Qass. Book. COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT COMMENCEMENT DAYS :Tt^>^o THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO COMMENCEMENT DAYS A BOOK FOR GRADUATES BY WASHINGTON GLADDEN ^ AUTHOR OF " LIVE AND LEARN," ETC. N?m fnrk THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1916 All rights reserved UlSp-sal Copyright, 1916 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1916. 4r^ m -6 1915 i)a,A427550 ^ >tc "7--, PREFACE I COUNT myself in few things happier than in my remembrance of the friendship of two generations of college and university gradu- ates. This book is a souvenir of those pleasant associations. It contains what I have found it in my heart to say in various Commencement Addresses and Baccalaureate Sermons. No one could get the consent of his own conscience to bring anything other than his best thought to such an occasion; and as these words have ex- pressed to many graduating classes my deepest concern and my heartiest good wishes for their welfare, so I hope that many of those who shall come after them may find upon these pages the sober counsels of one who has never found it need- ful to talk down to young people, nor expedient to flatter them, but who has learned to believe that the call to the highest things is the call to which they are most ready to respond. Washington Gladden. Columbus, January 15, 1916. COMMENCEMENT DAYS PAGE I. The School of Work 3 II. Castles in the Air 41 III. What is Worth While.^ 67 IV. Some Things I have Learned 87 V. Short Cuts loi VI. Study and Growth 125 VII. Books and Reading 143 VIII. What For.? 165 IX. Good Work for Graduates 185 X. Leaders or Followers.'* 207 XL Form and Substance 227 I THE SCHOOL OF WORK Commencement Days THE SCHOOL OF WORK THESE bountiful days of June have many delights and invitations for us; the roses are blowing and the wedding bells are chiming, and orioles and bobolinks are pouring out their souls in song; and amid all these pleasant scenes and sounds the scholars are gathering on the campus and in the chapel, to receive the meed of faithful work, to speak the parting word, and to linger, for a moment, in associations that have become dear, before they go out to meet the shadowy future. To some of us these days are memorable; our thoughts go back to other Junes in another century, when the bands and the banners and the marshals with their batons, and the old graduates with their mouldy jokes, and the mothers and the sisters and the cousins and the aunts beaming with apprecia- tion and expectation, made up a mise en scene full of dramatic possibilities. I wonder if commence- 3 4 COMMENCEMENT DAYS ment means as much to these young fellows as it meant to some of us old fellows, fifty years ago. It is hard for me to believe it. "The world is so full of a number of things" that were not within our ken in the middle of the last century, that it seems as if nothing could really mean quite as much to anybody as everything did in that slow old time. Yet I make no doubt there is more than one in this presence whose heart is heavy with the sense of what is ending here to-day; with the consciousness that something has been hap- pening in the last four years that never can happen again; with a wistful and apprehensive premoni- tion of what is behind the veil. Yes, I am sure that these young men and women are consciously confronting here to-day much the same question that we older ones faced in the Junes to which we are looking back. The costume of the festival is diiferent; the realities of life are not radically altered. There are some of us who have more to remember than you, but you have more to hope for than we; and in this hour when yesterday and to-morrow have met together, when memory and hope have kissed each other, I would fain believe that all of us, old and young, are ready for a little serious thought upon the meaning of life. Most of us have lived long enough to know THE SCHOOL OF WORK 5 that the end of a college course Is not the goal of intellectual attainment; commencement is the right word; those who honorably reach it are fairly over the threshold of their education; they have done well if they are now ready to begin to learn what life has to teach. A course in the University has served its purpose if it has laid some good foundations on which future accumu- lations of experience may rest; if it has given some training in habits of investigation; if it has developed some power of appreciating the best in life and art; if it has laid down the lines on which study may be usefully continued; if it has lifted up and clarified some worthy ideals of conduct and service. I hope that your four years in the University has done as much as this for most of you. If it has, the expenditure has been abund- antly justified. We frequently hear from those who have been popularly deemed the most successful men of this generation, the judgment that a college edu- cation is of little or no value; that it rather unfits a man for such enterprises as those by which they have risen to eminence. This is interesting testi- mony, and I trust that it Is true. If our colleges did equip men for such enterprises, that would be the strongest possible reason for never going to college. If your university training has not made 6 COMMENCEMENT DAYS you incapable of entertaining the plutocratic pur- pose, or of rendering the plutocrat willing and efficient service in the realization of his purpose, it has not done much for you. It is to be hoped, however, that it has fitted you I to take up some honorable and worthy calling, some calling which will seem to you to be "af- fected," as the lawyers say, "with a public in- terest"; some calling in which you can feel your- self to be identified with the common welfare. Now, manifestly, there are some callings which no fair-minded man can so regard. There are some callings the aggregate result of which must be public injury; they are evil and only evil, and that continually. There are others which may result in some incidental benefits; by means of them we might do some good but the harm would outweigh the good; the more we prospered in them the larger would be the social damage. Such callings might be profitable financially, for, strange to say, there are millions of human beings who are ready to offer larger rewards to those who do them injury than to those who do them good; but no one on whom a college education has not been wasted, will select a calling the net result of which is social injury, no matter how large the prospective profits may be. Some calling, then, which links itself with the THE SCHOOL OF WORK 7 well-being of our neighbors and our fellow men, the diligent prosecution of which will not only secure for ourselves an honorable livelihood, but will add, in some appreciable degree, to the sum of human happiness — this, let us trust. Is now or soon will be, within the choice of every member of this graduating class. Let me say also that this calling ought to be, in every case, a congenial calling. I know well that in some cases it cannot and will not be; stern necessity and relentless circumstance often drive us into occupations that are not thoroughly congenial and keep us in them; but so far as we have the power of choice we ought to choose the work we like best — not that which brings us the largest pecuniary recompense, not that which promises most speedily to enrich us, but that which is most interesting to us, that which most completely enlists all our powers of body and mind. What is before all things essen- tial is that we shall be interested in our work; that we shall believe it to be worth doing; that we shall be able to put love and enthusiasm into it. And even though, by force of circumstances, we may be constrained to engage in work which does not at first strongly appeal to us, it is best to make a virtue of necessity and adapt ourselves, as best we can, to our callings. In any work that is worth doing we may surely find much that awak- 8 COMMENCEMENT DAYS ens thought and elicits enthusiasm; in industry, as in appetite, there are acquired tastes, and we may learn to take a genuine interest in work which at the beginning was unattractive. The point on which I now desire to lay em- phasis is this, that the discipline by which a man comes to himself and completes his manhood is mainly that which is won in the pursuit of the calling by which he gains his livelihood. "The great majority of men," says a late strong writer, "gather an edifying understanding of men and things just in so far as they actually and resolutely stick to the performance of some special, and (for the most part) congenial task. Their education in life must be grounded in the persistent attempt to realize in action some kind of purpose — a pur- pose usually connected with the occupation whereby they live. In the pursuit of that purpose they will continually be making experiments — opening up new lines of work, establishing new relations with other men, and taking more or less serious risks. Each of these experiments offers them an opportunity both for personal discipline and for increasing personal insight." * Your education, then, the best part of it, will be gained in your work. The best educated men are educated not for their work but by their work. * " The Promise of American Life," by Herbert Croly, p. 404. THE SCHOOL OF WORK 9 You may, Indeed, have Intellectual interests outside of your dally business; it Is well to have these; life is often greatly enriched by liberal studies pursued In leisure hours; but, after all, the best part of your education will be that which you win In the prosecution of your dally task. This means, of course, that your prevailing In- terest in your work shall be in the work itself, rather than the money that you are making out of it. There Is real educational value in doing any kind of good work well; there is no educational value whatever In cultivating and gratifying the appetite for gain. Just to the extent to which the craving for more becomes the motive power of a man's life Is the educational process retarded, just so far does the man himself become dwarfed and deformed. What you wish to do is to make the most of yourself; to complete your individuality; to be- come the man or woman that God meant you to be. This means for the community great variety of capacity and attainment. It is by these manifold diversities of power that society is enriched. *'A genuine Individual," says the author I just quoted, "must at least possess some special quality which distinguishes him from other people, which unifies the successive phases and the various aspects of his own life and which 10 COMMENCEMENT DAYS results in personal moral freedom." The man whose ruling interest is in his work is apt to be- come in this sense a genuine individual; but when the acquisitive motive becomes dominant, there is no chance for the development of any interest- ing personality. The man is going after the same thing that the rest of the crowd are pursuing; they are all shaped by the same forces; they are not likely to attain unto "any edifying personal independence or any peculiar personal distinc- tion." "Different as American business men are from one another in temperament, circum- stances and habits," says our author again, "they have a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike. Their individualities are forced into a common mold, because the ultimate measure of the value of their work is the same, and is nothing but its results in cash." * Consequently it is true that even in a society as active and strenuous as ours there is a vast amount of monotony. The commercial motive is suffered to be the dominant motive, and so far as this is true, the characters produced tend to one type. The ruling ideas are the same and there is a dreary sameness in the opinions enter- tained and the views of life expressed. Mammon is a potentate who does not encourage diversities * "The Promise of American Life, " by Herbert Croly, p. 410. THE SCHOOL OF WORK ii of gifts; no theories that disturb the standing order or the vested interests are permitted in his domain; of all new notions his devotees are apt to be intolerant. This explains the prevalence of fads and fashions In circles where the commer- cial motive Is dominant; the last place in the world where you would look for any kind of originality would be In the ranks of the four hundred. Where "wealth accumulates" until it becames the para- mount and absorbing Interest of life, "men de- cay," or dwindle Into units of economic force: "The individual withers, and the world is more and more." If, then, what the commonwealth wants of each of us is a full-rounded and complete per- sonality, It will never do for us to permit our- selves to fall under the spell of the prevailing Mammonism, for that inevitably reduces the dimensions of the man. It is in the work itself, and in the contribution which It makes to the common weal, that we shall find the enlargement and invlgoratlon of our manhood. "For," as our author admonishes us, "the truth Is that individuality cannot be dissociated 'from the pursuit of a disinterested object. It is a moral and intellectual quality and It must be realized by moral and intellectual means." The man 12 COMMENCEMENT DAYS comes to himself only when he is forgetting him- self in devotion to some good outside of and beyond himself. Let us assume therefore that each one of the young men and women before me will have found before many months, some calling which connects itself closely with the public welfare, and will be pursuing that calling, not primarily as a means of personal aggrandizement, but as a work which on its own account is worth doing, because it tends to increase the sum of human happiness. I wish to consider with you how such a calling, pursued in such a spirit, becomes a continuous and fruitful educational opportunity. Some of you may have been lamenting that your educa- tion must now be regarded as finished. I want you to see that although you may not look for- ward to postgraduate studies within academic walls, by far the best part of your education is still to come. Let us suppose, for example, that your vocation is to be the most ancient and honorable of all — the work assigned to unfallen man in the Garden of Eden — is there not in this work a great educa- tional opportunity.? I may fairly assume that those among you who are to be farmers have been studying agriculture here in the University, and that you have got some inkling of the need of THE SCHOOL OF WORK I^ mixing brains with husbandry. You surely do not need to be told of the manifold problems that wait for solution, in the reclamation of waste lands, in the improvem.ent of the soil and its products, in the reforestation of the hills, in *' making the wilderness to bring forth and bud that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater," in socializing the countryside, that the people dwelling there shall find the stimula- tion and the solace of good companionship, and the opportunities of a rewarding culture. If these aspects of your work as farmers loom large before your thought, if it is by these that your enthusiasms are aroused, and your energies are directed, I am sure that you are in a fair way to become highly educated men. And this, I assume, is what you want to be. The main thing that you want to get out of this calling of yours for yourself is a large, fruitful, noble manhood. You expect, and you have a right to expect, that you will get a comfortable living out of your work; that you will have enough to eat and to wear; that you will have an attractive and beautiful home; and there is not much reason to fear that the man who puts brains and enthusiasm into the business of farming will not get as much as that out of it, and something more. But this something more is not your first concern. Your 14 COMMENCEMENT DAYS main question is not how large gains you can make but how you can most fully and worthily express and realize your life in this calling you have chosen. You have a neighbor, perhaps, who went into this business for the money there was in it, and who has come to the end of his working life with a big balance in the bank, with a safe, full of productive securities, with three or four auto- mobiles, and all the outward signs of abundance. But how has he done it? He has skinned one or two thousand acres of good land leaving it per- ceptibly poorer than when It came under his hand; he has neglected all opportunities of self- Improvement; he has pushed his Interests with no regard to the welfare of his neighbor; he has sown broadcast, as every selfish man always does, the seeds of dissension and suspicion and 111 will. Of course, in the process his own personality has steadily withered and dwindled. Most men, look- ing at the balance In the bank and the con- tents of the safe call him a successful farmer; do you.? If all men were such as he, society would cease to exist, and the earth would be unin- habitable. He furnishes you, nevertheless, an excellent object lesson of the kind of man you do not want to be. I trust that the sight of him may Inspire THE SCHOOL OF WORK 1 5 you with the ambition to live In such a way that when your working days are over some one who knows you well may be able to say of you: "He is not a plutocrat; he is not leaving to his children any great accumulation of stocks and bonds by means of which they will be able to live in idle- ness on the labor of future generations. But look at his farm; see the fertile meadows where once were swamps; see the new forest clothing the once barren hillside; see the growing crops and fine farm buildings; see the splendid herds and flocks that enrich the pastures; look at the records that tell of the fruits and grains he has developed, of the pests he has stamped out; his own farm will sustain four times as much life to-day as when he began to till it, and every farmer in the land is his debtor. And see what he has made of himself. He is the brightest man in the county; these studies and experiments of his have been quickening his intellect and leading his mind out into many fruitful fields of knowledge and culture, and all these gains he has been free to share with all his neighbors; if you want to know what kind of a man he is, ask them. He is the heart and soul of all neighborhood life; he has done more than any other man to promote good will and friendship in the countryside and to make it a pleasant place for men and women and l6 COMMENCEMENT DAYS boys and girls to live." If something like that can be said about you when the end comes, then it will be clear that the foundations laid here in the University have been well built upon; that to-day's commencement was the bright beginning of a glorious career; that you have made yourself an example of a thoroughly educated man. It would be easy to show how the same law holds in every other lawful calling. When the relation of the calling to the common good is recognized and emphasized, and when the calling is heartily pursued with that end in view — to make it as efficient as It can be made in the service of the commonwealth — the individuality de- veloped must be high and strong and fine. In some callings the fact that the man gets his best development in and by means of his work is so plain that it hardly needs to be stated. In the case of a teacher or of a minister of the Gospel, for instance, the purpose of doing one's work well, and the purpose of making the most of one's self can hardly be separated in thought. For myself I know that I have gained all the power I possess in the earnest endeavor to do my work well; to understand and meet the intellec- tual and spiritual and social needs of my fellow men. The college and the divinity school can help a little in laying foundations, but most of THE SCHOOL OF WORK 17 what any competent minister knows he gets in living contact with human beings, in helping men and women to be friends with God and friends with one another, in trying to bring heaven to earth. Any man who will give himself to that work patiently and diligently will have some fair chance to be a pretty well educated man. Not less true is it that the physician's occupa- tion links him with the common weal. His busi- ness in life is to do good; that is kept steadily before his mind. Through his work not only is his intellect invigorated but his sympathies and affections are given abundant exercise. For this reason the educational opportunity which his work affords him is of the finest and highest sort. What shall we say of the work of the lawyer? I fear that we cannot say so much. The popular conception of the lawyer's function is altogether different from the popular conception of the physician's function. The suggestion that the doctor's business in life is to do good would be commonplace. The suggestion that the lawyer's business in life is to do good would be received with merriment by the unthinking crowd. It must be admitted that the modern practice of law does not always keep the ethical and social aspects of the lawyer's calling in high relief. The common conception is, no doubt, that the prac- 1 8 COMMENCEMEN T DA YS tice of law is essentially warfare, to which the maxim, "Everything is fair in war," may be legitimately applied. The lawyer, in the estima- tion of the populace, is a kind of mercenary gladia- tor, who is ready, for a fee, to help those who seek injustice or wrong; whose skill is often em- ployed in showing transgressors how they may evade the law or escape its just penalty. It must be confessed that there are a good many lawyers in this country whose estimation of the nature of their calling, as their conduct shows, is not different from that of the populace. Some of them occupy conspicuous positions and have made great fortunes by the services which they have rendered to combinations of predatory wealth. The enormous creations of fictitious capital which are crushing the life out of the in- dustries of the land, and which are liable to result one of these days in a national tragedy the like of which history has never witnessed, are largely the work of astute lawyers. The nation has had no worse enemies than the lawyers who have worked out the manifold schemes by which the strong are enabled to prey upon the weak. When the lawyer's calling is so conceived and so followed, we can hardly think of it as affording an educational opportunity. Lawyers of this class are not educated by their work, they are THE SCHOOL OF WORK 19 de-educated; they may acquire a kind of wolfish cunning, but their better nature is dwarfed and crippled by such unsocial and traitorous prac- tices. They are adroit men, resourceful men, masterful men, but we could not call them great men. But there have been lawyers — there are lawyers — who do not so conceive their calling, and who could no more get their own consent to help men practice injustice than they could persuade them- selves to poison their neighbor's well or set his house on fire. Mr. Winston Churchill, in one of his stories, invents for us a lawyer who had made a large reputation by legitimate practice in St. Louis, and who, when he was called to New York to be chief adviser of one of the great trusts, quietly but positively declined a position ofi'ering him a salary of one hundred thousand dollars, on the ground that "a lawyer who hired himself out to enable one man to take advantage of another, prostituted his talents." There are such men, outside of story books. Abraham Lincoln was such a lawyer, as all the traditions agree. It was because he was such a lawyer that he rose to the mental and moral stature which made him the greatest American. He got his education, and it was a splendid education, in his work. There 20 COMMENCEMENT DAYS in that country law practice, in living contact with all sorts and conditions of men, holding steadily before his mind the great ideals of jus- tice, integrity, freedom and good will to men, he developed an intellect and built up a character which qualified him to be, in the great crisis of our national life, the leader of the nation. The practice of the law, as Lincoln practiced it, af- fords a great opportunity for the development of the highest manhood. There is no better field for the exercise of the highest qualities of human nature than that which is open to a lawyer who regards his calling as a social function, and aims to make his daily work tributary to the common good. Such a lawyer will never advise a client to prosecute or defend an unjust claim; in all civil cases he will make sure that the cause which he espouses is the cause of righteousness. He is an officer of the law, and to the law, not to his client, his supreme allegiance is due. There are many things that he can do for honest clients, to protect them in their rights, to see that they get justice, to interpret and apply the laws which regulate their conduct, and in all this he is teach- ing respect for the law, which is the safeguard of freedom, and helping to make life and property secure. Beyond this it is his business, as an officer of the law, to study its workings, to note THE SCHOOL OF WORK 21 its defects, to find out how it can be made more simple and more equitable; how to prevent its being used as the shelter of rascality and the in- strument of plunder; how to make it more and more the handmaid of liberty and the safeguard of well-being. So conceived and so followed, there is no more liberalizing, no more ennobling business on earth than the practice of the law; there is no occupation in which a man can grow faster, or win a more symmetrical and lustrous manhood. I will not promise the man who prac- tices law after that manner that he will get any hundred thousand dollar salaries; the predacious classes will have no use for him; but I think that he may hope for a decent livelihood; that he may win and hold the love and honor of his fellow citizens, and that he may come to his end with a good consciousness of having left the world better than he found it. It would be interesting to follow this analysis through all the vocations, but that would take a book. Let me speak of only two more, in both of which human faculties find large scope, and in which, if they were rightly conceived and used, the educational opportunity would be most inspiring. The first is the railway business. The vast proportion to which this business has grown, the 22 COMMENCEMENT DAYS enormous magnitude of the systems in which it is organized, makes one doubt whether it ought to be or can much longer be entrusted to any authority less supreme than that of the common- wealth. But as things are now the business is under private management; and the policy of every great railroad system is shaped and guided by a few men — often by one man. What I am thinking of is the immense educational oppor- tunity that comes to the man or the men on whom this responsibility rests. To a very large extent the welfare of the com- munity depends on the railways; they are the arteries of communication through which the life blood of commerce flows; if they are free and unobstructed the health of the nation is secure; if they are clogged or closed morbid conditions immediately appear. Few kinds of public serv- ice are, therefore, more important than that which is rendered by the manager of the great railway. The comfort, the safety, the prosperity, the well-being of the community are largely in his keeping. If he is permitted to regard this as his business, to be conducted by himself accord- ing to his own pleasure and for his own profit, he will exert tremendous power over the life and the liberty of the people. Whom he will he may set up, and whom he will he may put down. By THE SCHOOL OF WORK 23 slight and secret discriminations he may give one shipper or one community the advantage over another, enhancing the gains of some and sapping the resources of others. And where there Is no favoritism, the business may be so conducted as to be burdensome to the com- munity; the railroad may be loaded with fictitious debts, the Interest of which must be paid by the public; for It Is quite possible for railway managers to devote the larger part of their energy to the manipulation of the finances, greatly neglecting the practical management of the business. I have heard bitter complaints from subordinate railway officials that their chiefs were more concerned about the stock market than about transportation; that far too much of the railway business was done on Wall street. It is easy to point out systems in which the deterioration of the service is traceable to this cause. When the railway Is, in the manager's thought, mainly a mill for the grinding out of what are known as securities, and the railway business is largely the reorganization of properties and the multi- plication of debts and the floating of new issues, and all the manifold and exciting diversions of frenzied finance, the educational opportunity of the railway manager is not apt to be an inspiring one. That is not the kind of soil in which the 24 COMMENCEMENT DAYS finest manhood is apt to take root. The men who get their principal education in that school are not great men. They are great graspers, of course — great bosses, great buccaneers — but not great men. These operations of high finance have their root in unalloyed egoism; there is not a glimmer of consideration for the public good in any such transactions: many of them are barefaced rob- bery. It would be a grotesque conceit that men engaged in such occupations were in the way of developing their manhood. It is wolf- hood, not manhood, to which they are reaching forth. But I am thinking of the man with a social conscience — the man who identifies his interest with the interest of the commonwealth, and finds the recompense of his labor in the common good — I am thinking of this man and of the rail- way business as offering him a great field and a great opportunity. Surely, as we have seen, this business does connect itself very closely with the public welfare. Safe and cheap and reliable transportation has become one of the necessaries of life in our modern civilization. The railway has often become a great instrument of public plunder; but it may become a great helper of public well-being. And it is possible that a man of large intelligence and THE SCHOOL OF WORK 25 fine organizing ability should take up this business with the purpose, not of aggrandizing himself and his associates by means of it, but of making it serve the community in the most efficient way. To study railroading on the earth, and not finan- cial kite-flying in the air; to treat the railway system under his charge not as a culture-tank for the propagation of millions of fictitious capital, but as a great mechanism for the production of human welfare; to make the service as prompt and expeditious and cheap as it can be made; to reduce the horrible mortality among railway employes; to establish between the company and its servants relations of loyalty and friendliness, and to enlist their enthusiastic support in im- proving the service; to study the local conditions and industries in all the communities served, so as to make the railway meet their wants and develop their prosperity; to organize and direct this great public service so that it shall bear the burdens and supply the wants and minister to the happiness of all the people who live along the lines — this is surely a high and noble calling. Of course those who have loaned their money for the building and equipment of this road ought to have a reasonable return for the use of it, and that the manager would be bound to secure. Beyond that he would see that the earnings of 26 COMMENCEMENT DAYS the road were used for the improvement and cheapening of the service, and all the world would see that neither he nor any of those connected with him were heaping up colossal fortunes out of tribute levied on the patrons of the road. What a magnificent educational opportunity the railroad business would offer to a man who took it up with some such purpose, and kept that purpose steadily before his mind! He would get his education in his work, and what a man it would make of him! How wide would be the range of his technical and scientific knowledge; how much he would have to learn about human nature, and human conditions and needs, and the common life of the people; how broad would his outlook be upon social tendencies and world movements! And out of such a purpose to serve his fellow men, to make the conditions of life freer and fairer for the multitude, what an en- largement and ennoblement of character would surely come to him. He could not, of course, leave to his heirs the power to live in luxury upon the earnings of this railway, for that power he had never sought; but he could leave to his chil- dren the legacy of a noble name, and his monu- ment would be a great industrial organization whose ruling law was public service instead of public plunder. THE SCHOOL OF WORK 27 The other business that I had in mind is that of insurance, particularly life insurance. Here, now, is a business which connects itself even more obviously with human welfare. It is not needful to expatiate on this. You have listened more than once to the eloquence of the agents. What they tell you about the beneficence of the busi- ness is substantially true; when conducted upon legitimate lines it is a wise provision for future needs. All this involves large accumulation of trust funds to meet the maturing claims of the insured; and to guard these funds vigilantly, to invest them securely, to husband them judiciously, to administer the whole business so that the cost of insurance shall be as low as possible, con- sistent with safety, and to make it all tributary to the welfare of the insured — this is what life insurance professes to do, and what, I have no doubt, in some good degree, it often does. Clearly it is not, by original intention, a scheme by which a few persons heap up enormous gains at the expense of the insured. It is not contemplated that the managers of these companies shall build themselves palatial homes or pay themselves princely stipends out of the funds collected for the widows and orphans of the insured, and it is not easy to understand how men who have done such things can look in the glass without 28 COMMENCEMENT DAYS blushing. Much less Is it conceivable that the managers of such companies would take these trust funds and use them in enterprises of their own, enriching themselves by the gains that belonged to the insured. When the business of life insurance is managed in this way, the educational opportunity is not large, and the kind of men that are made by this process are not great men. Of this fact we have had some pitiful and startling demonstra- tions. We saw the test suddenly and searchingly applied to several such, and what became of them? They had loomed large in the financial world — colossi we had esteemed them; how quickly they shriveled and vanished from the sight of men — broken, humiliated, stripped of their dignity, shorn of their power! It is quite clear that the life insurance business conducted as an instrument of plunder is not a school in which to produce great men. But the life insurance business, held firmly to its true purpose, conducted as an agency for the promotion of thrift, and making provision for future needs, might be a splendid school for the development of high and strong character. The fidelity, the intelligence, the knowledge of safe and prudent finance, which are called for in the administration of such a trust make large de- THE SCHOOL OF WORK 29 mands on human nature. It must be that safe insurance can be furnished at a cost far below the ordinary charges; for after all the extrava- gance and robbery and waste of the great com- panies, they remain still strong and solvent; and this would seem to demonstrate that there is a large field for the application of safe economies to the business of insurance. Splendid work is waiting to be done in this field — work that will call for the finest qualities of mind and heart. It is one of many callings in which, if a man will apply to it brains and conscience and good will, he may work out great results for humanity; and in the work find the opportunity of developing to the full his own manhood. I trust that these illustrations drawn from widely different fields of human activity have helped to make plain the truth which we set out to enforce — that we get our best education in our daily work, when that work is chosen because it is tributary to the common good and is con- sciously pursued with that end in view. I hope that we shall be able to see that there is room for such social aims in all legitimate callings, and a chance therefore for every one of us. In our daily work, to win something better than wealth — even a large and fair manhood and womanhood. And is it not clear that a community made up 30 COMMENCEMENT DAYS of such men and women would come near to realizing heaven upon earth? In placing such a scheme of life before these young men and women, I do not, however, con- ceal from myself the fact that one serious dis- couragement confronts them. What I have been urging is that they identify their personal in- terests with the commonwealth; that they find their largest recompense in the thought that they are promoting the common welfare. But here are civic and political organizations in the city, the state and the nation which are supposed to represent the common welfare — governments of the people, which ought to be governments by the people and for the people; what encourage- ment do they offer, what helps do they hold out to those who would organize their lives upon the plan which I have been urging? Take the people who are managing our poHtics and ad- ministering our governments, by and large, and what is their attitude toward such a proposition as I have been advocating? Are they as a class consistently directing all their endeavors toward the public good, and making private gain a wholly subordinate consideration? They are surely the people who are pledged to such a course of action. Whatever may be true of the rest of us, there can be no question that this is what they THE SCHOOL OF WORK 31 are supposed to do, and what they are in honor bound to do. How is it with them? Every one of us knows that there are men in the public offices to whom the common good is the paramount concern, and who are honestly working to secure it with all their powers. If all were such this would be a happy nation. But every one of us knows also that great multitudes of those to whom the interests of the common- wealth are committed are quite ready to sacrifice the common good to private gain or advantage. And it is, at least, an open question whether the prevailing tendency among those who are charged with the public administration is not to use pub- lic office for self-aggrandizement more than for service. It is even a question whether the theory of government, as popularly held, makes room for such a motive as that on which we have been thinking. There is, indeed, in the preamble of the national constitution, one clause which recognizes the duty of the government to "promote the general welfare," but the implications of that clause have always been disputed; there are many who contend that it is not the nation's business to promote welfare, whether general or special; that it has no other function than to keep the peace, and lay down certain rules for 32 COMMENCEMENT DAYS the regulation of the competitive game, and then leave every one free to promote his own welfare in his own way. The prevailing idea of our polit- ical science has been that there is no common good, other than liberty, which the nation is organized to promote; that all it has to do is to provide a free arena, in which individuals may compete for such good things as are within their reach. The idea of a large organized co-operation for common ends, through the city or the state or the nation, has been regarded by most as a political heresy. It is true that we have been practically moving away from that position; we have been learning to co-operate more and more, but always under protest — always with the mis- giving that in cherishing common economic aims we were violating the fundamental principles of our democracy. It seems to me that we are confronting here one of the serious problems of our democratic state. It has been made very plain in our study this morning that no man can reach the highest manhood unless he identifies his personal aims with the common welfare; and yet our govern- ment seems to be organized upon the assumption that the only welfare with which we are con- cerned is individual welfare. Is it rational to expect that citizens will cherish social aims when THE SCHOOL OF WORK 33 the state is based on individualistic theories? I do not believe that it Is. And I am persuaded that a considerable revision of our fundamental ideas concerning democracy has got to take place along these lines, in order that we may make our public morality coincide with our private morality; In order that when the farmer and the teacher and the doctor and the lawyer and the railway manager and the Insurance pro- moter and all the rest take up the purpose of making their work contribute to the common good, they may distinctly see and know that their work is included in and co-operant with the highest aims of the state and the nation. In short, I think that our democracy has got to be moralized, in its conscious aims; that It must be something more than an umpire among fighters; that it must be a promoter of good will and mu- tual helpfulness among friends; that it must learn to cherish visions of a good that may be shared by all and promoted by common effort, and make plain the paths that lead to it. Democ- racy in its deepest meaning Is more than liberty, it is brotherhood; that meaning we must lift into the light. Never until this larger faith is cherished by the nation, and Incarnated In the life of the nation, shall we be able to keep alive in the hearts of the citizens those 34 COMMENCEMENT DAYS social aims in which their highest manhood is realized. It may be said that we shall never have a socialized nation until the individual citizens are socialized; but that is a little like saying that we shall never have a socialized family until the children are socialized. It is the life of the or- ganism that shapes the life of its members. When it is seen that the common bond is brotherhood we may begin to hope that the people will begin to act brotherly. It is true, of course, that here as in all things vital and spiritual, the action is reciprocal; brotherly men help to make a broth- erly nation; public and private moralities react upon each other; the ideals of the commonwealth inspire the citizen and the fidelities of the citizen find fruitage in the commonwealth. Thank God for the signs we see that the larger meaning of the national life is beginning to gain entrance to the thought of the people and to shape the national policies. I am sure that these young men and women, who go forth with the purpose of finding work In which they can make their lives tributary to the common good, will find the life of the city and the state and the na- tion coming continually into closer harmony with their central purpose. They themselves will help to lift up the national ideals; they will be part of THE SCHOOL OF WORK 35 that larger life into which the nation is leading them. I have kept you long enough, young men and women; I must not tax your patience further. I have tried to fix your thought, in this last hour of your undergraduate life, upon questions most central and vital in your future experience; I hope that a few things have been made plain. That the nation and the state want you to go on and complete the education which they have helped you here to begin, to make the most of yourselves, each one to complete a large, fair, fruitful personality; that this will be done if it is done at all, in the work by which you gain your livelihood, and that it can only be done when the excellence and the beneficence of that work, rather than the gain which you gather from it, become the chief motive in your life — all this, I hope, has been made credible. I look forward with you to the days of happy labor which lie before you in which you shall many times verify the great saying of Emerson, that the reward of a good work is to have done it. I hope that some of you who go forth to take possession of the land, under the old commission to dress it and to keep it, may hold before your minds a life like that of Luther Burbank; may have no more care than he has had for the things 36 COMMENCEMENT DAYS that all the world Is seeking; may know something of his glorious passion for making a better world of this, and may become, by the methods that he has followed, truly educated men and women. I hope that there may be many among you who will find the shining paths that led Faraday and Agassiz, not to millionism, but to the summits of great achievement In the enlargement of hu- man knowledge and well-being. I hope that there may be those among you who will learn to marshal men, and lead them, with never a hint of conflict, in the ways of peaceful industry; for the great industrial honors of the next generation are to be won not by pro- ducers of goods, but by employers of men. The one business which employers of labor most need to learn. Is the business of the employer. I hope that as lawyers such careers as those of Romilly and Brougham, of Marshall and Story may give you some hint of the Ways in which you may serve your country and mankind, and If there are no signal instances of the railway manager or the Insurance promoter who have cared more to make great men of themselves by public service than to make millionaires of them- selves by financial manipulations, the path is free before some of you to those high fields of fair renown. THE SCHOOL OF WORK 37 In the service of the state there is no dearth of splendid examples of that clear purpose on which we have been looking — of men who rose to great- ness by making their work supreme and putting the stipend behind their backs — from Washing- ton, who led the armies of the Revolution for seven years without a penny of compensation of his services, and Lincoln who guided the na- tion through its crucial conflict with no dream of any higher reward than the privilege of serving and suffering — to many a valiant soul, still serv- ing, who has never asked of his country or of the world anything better than the privilege of doing with his might whatever his hand should find to do. None of these men was ever a self- seeker; all of them have made themselves what they were by identifying their lives with the na- tion that they loved and finding their reward in the privilege of service. This is the path that is open to-day before all of you, and I can have no better wish for any of you than that you may find the entrance to it now and walk on in it with strength and joy to the end of your days. II CASTLES IN THE AIR II CASTLES IN THE AIR I REMEMBER a bright story, a children's story, by Mr. Thomas Dunn English, printed in one of the newspapers some years ago, of a strange country, some realm in fairyland, where the natural laws and processes were precisely the reverse of those with which we are familiar, and where, consequently, the mechanical and artificial methods were the opposites of ours. It is the same conception, substantially, as that of Lewis Carroll in his story of "Looking Glass Land." In this curious country of Mr. English's the houses were built on a very different plan from that generally followed by our contractors. Instead of digging a hole in the ground and laying the foundation first, these carpenters of fairyland began at the top and built downward. The first parts of the house finished were the tops of the chimneys; the ridge pole came next, then the roof, the eaves, and so on down to the ground; the foundation and the cellar were the last work done. This strikes us, of course, as do all of Alice's Experiences in Looking Glass Land, as a gro- 41 42 COMMENCEMENT DAYS tesque conceit, the wit of which consists in its flagrant violation of all scientific probabilities. The country where your finger begins to bleed now because you are going to prick it by and by, and where you remember what is going to happen next week, and where you are whipped to-day for the transgression you will commit to-morrow, and where, generally, the effects come first and are followed by these causes, is certainly a more marvellous country even than that wonderful Nowhere which Sir Thomas More saw in his beautiful dream. But It Is a good thing for us, now and then, to shake ourselves free from the tyranny of the formal logic, even by the aid of such whimsical conceits as these of the children's story-writers, and to transport ourselves into those realms when there are other tests of verity besides the syllogism and the multiplication table. Mr. English's quaint conceit about the architecture which comes down from above con- tains food for reflection. Much of our building, and not the least useful part of it, really follows these laws of fairyland. I find, for illustration, no less keen a thinker than Henry Thoreau saying this: "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be: now put foundations un- der them." Come to think of it castles always CASTLES IN THE AIR 43 are built in the air, often pretty high in the air; though it is not generally supposed that they were first hung up in that medium, and the foundations afterward put under them. Yet even this may seem, when we reflect upon it, not altogether untrue. Is not every castle at first, very literally, a castle in the air? Does it not first exist in the mind of the architect, an ethereal, unsubstantial structure, fashioned of such stufi" as dreams are made of? Does not this vision hang in the air over the spot which the castle is designed to occupy, suspended there by the architect's imagination? Moreover, is not the castle or the house always built, in this way, before the foundation? Is the foundation the first thing in the thought of the architect? Not at all. It is the superstructure, the general form and outline of it, the whole, made up of many parts, in their relations, that he first con- ceives. The foundation is an afterthought. The contractor, the mechanic, must begin, of course, with the foundation; but it is not so with the architect. For although the ground on which the building is to stand, and the surroundings of the building do, in some cases, materially affect the design of the architect, it is true, as a general rule, that it is the superstructure of which the architect first forms his conception; he fits his 44 COMMENCEMENT DAYS foundation to his building, and not his building to its foundation. He does not, indeed, follow the whimsical method of Mr. English's builders in fairyland by constructing the chimney tops and the ridge poles first, but the building as an architectural whole first takes shape in his mind before he thinks of the foundation that he will put under it. In the building of houses, as well as of castles in Spain, a considerable part of the process goes on in the realm of imagination, of ideality; and that part of the process does not conform to the laws of matter, the laws of mechanics, but frequently takes directions and follows laws which are exactly antithetical to these material laws. Thus we see that in the most common of our daily labors we are really dwelling in two worlds, and that the regimen of one of these is sharply contrasted with the other. Some there are who have most to do with the material world, and who are apt to think that the processes and suc- cessions of the material world alone are worthy of consideration; and others who devote so much of their time in the immaterial or ideal world that they lose their hold on tangible facts. But, in truth, we are all denizens of both these realms; the laws of both of them govern some portions CASTLES IN THE AIR 45 of our lives; none of us can be such a slave to sense that he does not have some commerce with the world of ideality, and none can be so visionary that he is not sometimes compelled to confront and reckon with hard material realities. And it is well for us frankly to recognize the dual nature of the life which we must live, and to make the proper provision for both sides of it. That the facts and forces of the material world must always condition and greatly modify the development of our ideal or spiritual lives is not to be denied; but, on the other hand, the ideal conceptions and the spiritual powers in us are all the while descending upon the material realm, imposing their own normative moulds upon its plastic substances; shaping its products according to their patterns. We must have stone masons, and we must also have architects. The one begins with digging in the earth or blasting the rocks for his foundation; the other begins in the imma- terial realm and fashions his structure there. The architect brings the building down out of empty space to earth, the stone mason or the carpenter builds it up from the earth into the air. Sometimes, very often indeed, the builder is his own architect; he rears the edifice first in his imagination, and then proceeds to put a foundation under it. 46 COMMENCEMENT DAYS This is the law of all creative work. The invention is first a castle in the air. The inventor conceives it, sees it, with his mind's eye, hanging in empty space, then proceeds to give it concrete existence. First it floats in the air, then it rests on the earth. A method of conveying sound through great distances by the use of the electric current — this is the dream; it haunts the brain of more than one curious and daring thinker; it is a castle in the air; who will be first to put a substantial foundation under it.^ Bell is his name; the tele- phone is what we call his apparatus. Steam is a force: it lifts the lid of the tea-kettle; it is known to act sometimes with terrific energy: can it be harnessed? can it be made to drive ma- chinery.^ That is the query that fills many minds for generations: by many rude devices it was imperfectly answered; finally the perfected ma- chinery of Watt put a firm foundation under this castle in the air. Thus every invention ger- minates in an idea; it may be a great, comprehen- sive idea, or an idea relating only to some mere matter of detail; but first it appears in the ideal world; then the inventor's problem is to get it down to earth; to cause it to materialize. We may go a little deeper than this and main- tain that the normative principles of science are CASTLES IN THE AIR 47 in our own minds, and not in the material realm. The mind brings to the world its own terms of explanation. We do not dig our science out of the earth, or hammer it out of the rocks or dissect it out of the tissues; the ideas of order, of unity, of resemblance, of force and cause, which give us science, are not primarily things, they are thoughts. Doubtless we converse with nature by the use of our senses. But our senses give us sensations, that is all — impressions of light, of sound, of touch, of taste; it is the discerning thought which arranges and organizes these impressions into knowledge. The mirror reflects the objects placed before it as the eye does; but the mirror does not see, nor does the eye; it is the mind that uses the eye as its instrument, which sees. Experience is, indeed, the method of knowledge. But what is experience? Experior, I find out. There must be some one there to find out before there can be experience. If you could bring all the phenomena of the universe, and dump them into an empty skull, there would be no knowledge then and no science. And that saying of mine is a Hibernicism; for what are phenomena; they are only impressions made upon a mind; when there is no mind there can be no phenomena. "The largest part of what I call Nature," says George Matheson, "never 48 COMMENCEMENT DAYS came to me through the five gates. Where did I get my idea of beauty? Came it from the hill- top or from the valley or from the plain? Nay, nor from anything without my own soul. Where did I get my sense of music? Came it from the vibrations of the air? All the vibrations in the world would not make one note of music; the kingdom of melody is within me. Where did I get my thought of natural law? Came it from the observations of science? Science itself would have been impossible if that thought had not been born before it. It came from my own mind, — from that sense of order which belongs to mind alone; I could never have seen it in the stars if I had not first felt it in my soul." As it is with the constructive and mechanical arts, as it is with science, so is it with every work of imaginative art. The conception is first, the realization follows. The Belvidere Apollo existed in the mind of the unknown sculptor before it ever found expression in marble. The Dresden Madonna was a divine ideality in Raphael's thought before her beauty ever shone upon the canvas. The Ode to Immortality kindled Words- worth's soul, as a sublime conception, before it took form in majestic verse. The Traiimerei of Schumann, the Pilgrims' Chorus of Wagner, was heard in the silence by the spiritual ear of the CASTLES IN THE AIR 49 composer before its ravishing strains were ever borne upon the waves of air. It is in this great art of music, Indeed, that we find the most striking Instances of the separation of the spiritual fact from the material form. What is music? The dictionary says that it is a succes- sion of sweet and pleasing sounds, but that seems to me an inadequate definition. I can take a music score of a simple composition and sit down in perfect silence, and find through the eye a keen pleasure in music which I never heard. More than that; the most exquisite melodies and harmonies, that never were heard on earth, and never will be, have often floated through my mind at midnight, when the ticking of the clock and the beating of my own heart were the only sounds that I could hear. Music is some- thing more than a succession of sweet and pleas- ing sounds. Indeed some of the greatest music that the world has ever heard was composed by a -man who when he composed it was stone deaf — who never heard it himself, with the outward ear, and who yet enjoyed it, I dare say, more than any one of the millions who have heard it since. It seems pathetic to read of Beethoven's com- posing the Solemn Mass, the Ninth Symphony, and the Sonata Pathetique, when the tones of the piano and the organ and the orchestra were 50 COMMENCEMENT DAYS totally inaudible to his outward ear; and to recall that notable evening when his Messa Solennis was performed in Vienna, in his presence, but not in his hearing, and when it was not until one of the singers turned him round to see the au- dience, that he was able to realize, from the spectacle of the excited multitude, with their waving hats and handkerchiefs and their shining faces, how powerful an impression the music had made. It is not true, perhaps, that one who was born deaf could ever comprehend music; but it is perfectly true that to one who once has entered into its secret, sound ceases to be essential to its enjoyment; musical ideas, apart from sound, give great pleasure; and always, in the creation of music, the ideal is first, and afterward its expres- sion In sound. Thus it becomes evident that all finest products, all greatest structures, have their origin in the world of the ideal, and find their way down from that lofty realm into the world of sense and fact. The building of castles in the air is not then quite so visionary and unproductive business as we have sometimes been led to regard it. Neverthe- less these visions of ours are not of much value unless we can somehow realize them. To get a substantial underpinning under our air castle; to bring it down from the sky and plant it CASTLES IN THE AIR 5 1 firmly upon the earth, this Is our problem. Day- dreaming Is a very ruinous occupation when It Is followed by no serious and strenuous efforts to accomplish the good which has kindled our imag- ination. Let us try to put our figures Into terms a little more prosaic. The relation to each other of these two sides of human life Is one that needs to be well understood. We must all be idealists; through all our minds crowds of fancies and possibilities and aspirations are always flitting; wishes, dreams, hopes, conjectures, schemes, re- port themselves in our consciousness: some of them are only transient guests; some of them press upon our thought very persistently; and our problem is to select from this motley throng of possibilities those which are worthy, and those which are practicable. Whether we have the power of generating ideals, by our own volition, I will not undertake to say, but we have certainly the power of selection among those that are presented to our minds; we may accept some and reject others; and I think we have also a large power of combination; we can take parts of some, and join them with parts of others, and thus pro- duce a whole more perfect than any conception which may come to us in moments of passive reflection. The best landscapes, perhaps, are 5 2 COMMENCEMENT DAYS . compositions. They are not copies, in complete- ness, of any existing landscape; they are made up of bits of scenery, which the painter has found, here and there, and he shows the perfection of his art in combining them into a harmonious whole. The finest characters in fiction are com- positions of the same sort; traits of one person and another are skillfully woven together to make up an ideal personality, a moral and intellectual unity which is more perfect than any mere por- trait of a life is apt to be. And one important part of our education is in learning how to use the materials which imagination so lavishly supplies to us — how to prune our fancies of all which is grotesque and impracticable; how to chasten our imaginations; how to dismiss quickly the unworthy and the foolish conceit; how to hold on to the ideals that are pure and lovely and honorable, and how to combine them into forms which shall give dignity and glory to life. Experience helps, of course, in the sifting of these imaginations. Many things which we once dwelt upon as de- sirable we no longer wish for; we have tried to realize them and are convinced that they cannot be realized; perhaps we have learned to believe that they ought not to be realized. But experi- ence, unhappily, is not, in this department, an infallible teacher; she sometimes makes us be- CASTLES IN THE AIR 53 lieve that things are impossible or impracticable, simply because labor and patience are required for their realization. Experience taught all the navigators of the old world but one that the Atlantic could not be crossed; it was the glory of Columbus that he refused to learn from experi- ence this disheartening lesson. Experience taught many of our statesmen in the dark days of 1862 and 1863 that the preservation of an undivided re- public in the heart of this continent was a barren ideality, an utter impossibility, and made them think that our nation ought to retire from the struggle and suffer the dismemberment of Its empire; but the same experience taught Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant that the union could be and must be preserved. I suppose that there are very few men living now, north or south, who are not glad that Lincoln's and Grant's interpre- tation of the lesson of experience was the one that prevailed. Experience is a good teacher, her lessons are well worth heeding, but she Is by no means In- fallible. Patrick Henry is reported to have said that he knew of no way of judging of the future but by the past. That was an unguarded saying. Was there no prophetic soul in this fiery orator, dreaming of things to come which the past had never seen? The future grows out of the past as 54 COMMENCEMENT DAYS the plant grows from the seed, but you can hardly judge by looking at the seed what the plant will be. "That which hath been," says the writer of Ecclesiastes, "is that which shall be, and that which hath been done is that which shall be done, and there Is nothing new under the sun." I have heard people try to justify this as a true and wise saying, but it is rank skepticism, bitter pessimism; you might as well justify what the fool says in his heart or what Bildad says to Job or what Satan says to Christ. All progress, all reformation, of men or of societies, all millennial hopes and aims spring from the belief that the thing which hath not been is the thing that shall be, and that the thing which hath not been done is the thing that shall be done. And this thing which the past has not seen and the future is to see, this thing that haunts our imagination and kindles our hope, that abides in the realm of the ideal and has not yet been realized, that is still a castle in the air wait- ing for its foundation, — this is one of the great forces of progress, one of the mighty strongholds of freedom and righteousness. It is evident that we must learn of the future not only from the past, but also from the throngs of prophetic wishes and hopes and imaginations that fill our souls continually. Multitudes of these doubtless, are ignes fatui; it is for us, as CASTLES IN THE AIR 55 I have said, to learn to distinguish the heavenly lights from the wandering meteors, and to know which we may safely follow. Our common sense and our moral intuitions will help us much in making these distinctions. Many of the things that come into our heads we are able at once to dismiss as impracticable or wrong. But our common sense and our moral intuitions need training. How to train them, so that their judgment shall be prompt and sure — that is the question. And I think that what a great essayist has said about this is true: that this wisdom is cultivated "by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our own stock notions and habits, which we now follow steadily and mechanically." The purification and correction of our ideals "by getting to know, on all the subjects which concern us, the best which has been said and thought in the world," — this is, indeed, a great part of our education. I would not undervalue such association as we can secure with the best of our neighbors and contemporaries, — with those of broadest knowledge, of purest purpose, of most unselfish lives. Such friendships are of 56 COMMENCEMENT DAYS great service to us, in clarifying our ideals. There is no influence so stimulating as that of life; it is always the light of men. But the need of great care in forming these friendships can hardly be overstated. It is only the wise and the brave and the unselfish from whom you can hope to receive any good gift. From the man who Is reputed to be most successful — the great grasper, the great imperator, the great egoist, you cannot keep too far away. You are far better off alone with your own musings than in some people's company. Nothing is better than a good friend and nothing worse than a bad one. Since, however, the stores of the world's noblest wisdom are open to us in books, we need never lack for higher and fairer companionship than the best of our neighbors is likely to furnish us. And therefore I would like to emphasize Arnold's maxim, once more, — only enlarging it a little. For I think that the purification and correction of our ideals will be effected by getting to know not only the best that has been said and thought in the world, but also the best which has been done in it. And I would emphasize the study of history and of biography, as good guides in the shaping of our ideals. For history will show us, on a very large scale, sometimes the nobility, and sometimes the futility, of our ideals. And CASTLES IN THE AIR 57 biography — the best of It — the record of the few greatest lives — is fuller of light, I think, for you and me, than any other kind of writing. What bracing of the best resolves, what enkindling of the purest enthusiasms, what uplifting of the thoughts, what enlargement of the affections have come to some of us as we have read the lives of John Colet, and Thomas More, and Oliver Crom- well, and Thomas Babington Macaulay, and Frederick Robertson, and Charles Kingsley, and Horace Bushnell, and Phillips Brooks, and Thomas Henry Huxley, and Abraham Lincoln. But Arnold's word is very wholesome if we take it just as he has left it. There is great help for us all in other literature than history and biography, in getting to know on all the subjects which concern us, the best that has been said and thought in the world. The great essayists, the great novelists, the great poets have guidance and inspiration for us which we must not miss. Here, as with our flesh and blood friendships, we have need of discrimination; let us have among books no friends but the noblest. I cannot ven- ture here on any specific counsels; the field is too wide. I will only say that for that particular purpose which we are now considering — the purification of our Ideals — the great poets will be your best servants. The power to appreciate 58 COMMENCEMENT DAYS and enjoy the best poetry is one that every one of you should covet and cultivate. There is no purer or more elevating pleasure than that which you may receive in your intercourse with these great interpreters of the human soul. Whoever knows well his Shakespeare, and his Milton, and his Wordsworth, and his Scott, and his Burns, and his Tennyson, and his Robert and Elizabeth Browning, and his Longfellow, and his Whittier, and his Lowell, and his Sidney Lanier, has a wide world to live in, and a glorious sky over his head and shining paths for his thoughts through the times and the eternities. And no one here will be inclined to dispute that he who wishes to know, on the subjects which most deeply concern him, the best that has been said and thought in the world will find in that one Book which is, by the testimony of all candid witnesses, the book of conduct, the book of righteousness, the book of life, more light and help than he can find any- where else. They who use the Bible as a book of conduct, — a book of life, — not quarreling about the theory of its inspiration, but seeking to par- take of its inspiration; casting themselves upon the current of its great hopes and promises, drinking in the spirit of prophets and psalmists and apostles; sitting at the feet of the one divine and perfect Teacher and Guide, — will find their CASTLES IN THE AIR 59 vision cleared and their judgment rectified, by the entrance of that word which giveth light, which giveth to the simple understanding. One more cautionary word needs to be spoken with respect to the dreams and visions of things possible which fill our minds. A good many people build more castles in the air than room can be found for on the earth. Their projects are too numerous to be realized. There is room in the air for innumerable castles; the space over our heads is limitless; we can pile these dream- structures, one upon another, tier above tier, but when we try to find a place for them upon the earth there is only a limited space at our command. I know some very good people whose lives have been failures from this very cause. Their minds were full of benevolent projects, far more than ground-room could possibly be found for in this crowded world. If they had bent their energies to putting foundations under a few of their air castles they would have accomplished vastly more. We have been speaking hitherto of our ideals as partial and fragmentary — as relating only to portions of life. Life is a whole made up of many parts; every action of life exists first in the ideal world and thence descends into the world of reality; and we have been thinking of these 6q COMMENCEMENT DAYS separate actions; of the ideal elements which enter into them, and of the best means of getting them realized. But life as a whole is also an ideality. We think of life, especially in our younger days, as one complete and coherent scheme. We consider not merely how we should act in any single emergency, but we form some conception of what we would become; of the character that we would form, of the career that we would follow. One must be a great deal lower than the angels — not much higher than the brutes — not to feel the constant pressure of these great questionings. And just at this season when the doors of schools and academies and colleges are opening outward upon the world, and great companies of young men and women are passing out of the period of pupilage into that of active labor, this outlook upon life ought to be, and is, I have no doubt, in many cases, exceptionally serious. There is much building of air castles, in these days. What manner of life shall my life be.^ is the question that many of you are asking. We have seen that it is not a useless question. Your life will be shaped, quite largely, by these conceptions which you now entertain of what life ought to be. In the silent hours your prophetic soul is often dreaming of things to come. It is good business, if you follow it CJSTLES IN THE AIR 6l wisely, if you do not overdo It. And In these silent hours, If you listen well, you will sometimes hear the Father of your spirit, saying unto you, "What house will ye build me, and where Is the place of my rest?" No house can contain him, indeed: that was the mistake of the old religionists, who Imagined that they could shut his influence within their temples; but we may rear for him a habitation wherein he shall delight to dwell. "Dear Comforter, eternal love, If thou wilt stay with me, Of lowly thoughts and simple ways I'll build a house for thee." It is quite within our power to build for our- selves castles In the air of which the glory of God shall be the light. The pattern of the life we ought to live will be displayed to us In these hours of serious thought if we will but lift our eyes to the source of inspiration. And there Is no business more important than that of getting this pattern, in Its main features, fairly before our thought. What is the ideal of your life.? Have you settled it with yourself what you wish to be.? You may have no very definite plans, but have you not some general Ideas.? And what are they.? You hope for success in life, of course; and what do you mean by success.? What are 62 COMMENCEMENT DAYS the cardinal elements of success? When your thought reaches forward to those prosperous days which are coming, as you hope, by and by, what are the features of the picture on which you most love to dwell? That air castle which you are building, what does it look like, to your imagination? Is it a storehouse stocked with the wealth of the world? That, I fear, is the general plan of the structures which most of you are building. Is it a banqueting hall or a place of revelling? Is it a safe retreat in which you can shut yourself from disagreeable contact with the outside world? I ask you these ques- tions because I desire to help you to satisfy yourselves precisely what is the thought of life which you are cherishing and that it is a worthy thought. If you have any misgivings about that, do not rest until you have subjected this spiritual architecture of yours to a searching criticism. That is the one point at which you cannot afford to make a mistake. The pattern of the life you mean to live — get that, at any rate, distinctly before your thought. Tolerate no confusion, no uncertainty here. Have a good understanding with yourself as to what, in its main features, you wish and intend that your life shall be. Do not let this air castle of yours be a mere cloud- pile, formless, incoherent, constantly changing. CASTLES IN THE AIR 63 It ought to be as sharply outlined as the archi- tect's plan is before he puts it on paper. Dwell upon its main design until it is well fixed in your own conception. And if you do this, I am toler- ably sure that the plan will be, on the whole, a worthy and noble one. I do not think that many of you are likely to form a definite plan of living a selfish, sordid, base, frivolous life. Such lives as these are not, generally, the result of a plan, but rather of the lack of plan. Men drift into these degradations. Don't drift. Know well whither you are going and be sure that you are going to the right place. Build your air castle. Take time enough to build it thoroughly and well. Build it after the heavenly pattern. Then by the grace of God bring it down to earth and put a foundation under it, a foundation of in- dustry and discipline and firm principle, that will stand after the everlasting hills have crum- bled into dust. You remember what the Revelator saw — that last sublime vision of his. It was the New Jerusa- lem, that great city, coming down out of heaven from God, coming down to earth. What is this city but the structure reared by the purified imaginations of good men, built up there in the heavenly silences, in the hours of quiet thought, — the perfect ideals of a glorified humanity born 64 COMMENCEMENT DAYS from above and descending upon the earth to take possession of it, and shape the life of the world, the life of home, and shop, and factory, and city, by the law of heaven? And we have to remember concerning this what one of deep insight has told us that " the New Jerusalem both descends and ascends. It is of the heavens, but it must be firmly built up and solidly but- tressed through its whole earthly superstructure. The humblest hod-carrier on the rising walls of the Holy City (for there is necessary spiritual toil which corresponds to what we wrongly call drudgery) does a nobler work than the self- absorbed angel, if such there can be, who flies lazily over it upon a cloud, giving no heart or thought or touch towards its uprearing. Every act of kindness, every sympathetic word, every righteous and loving life, however lowly, is a stone laid in the foundations of the city of God, to glow there forever as topaz, or sapphire, or amethyst." Your castle in the air, I trust, is one of those fair palaces of the golden city that is coming down out of heaven from God to fill the earth. Be diligent, then, with clear purpose and faithful service, to place beneath it a foundation firm and sure. Ill WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? Ill WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? TIERE is a little essay entitled "What is Worth While?" which has given its name to an extended series of similar little books. I have never read the original essay, but the familiar title of the series has often struck me as a most pregnant and pertinent inquiry. It suggests the thought that there is much that is not worth while: that a great many of us are making an uneconomical use of our possessions and opportunities, exchanging our goods for vanities, wasting our energies on what is worthless. And the suggestion comes home to us that a large part of wisdom must consist in getting out of the great variety of possible investments of time and resources, what is worth while. In the great exchanges of life we are spending freely time and thought and desire and labor: is it not of vast importance that we should get in return that which is compensatory? Some of us are convinced, no doubt, that we ought not to be living unto ourselves: that we ought to be doing what we can for others. But 68 COMMENCEMENT DAYS here, too, the same question arises. There are a good many unproductive philanthropies. Much of the labor that is put forth to make a better world of this is well meant, but it is not worth while. We spend our money for that which is not to the needy the bread of life and our labor for that which satisfieth neither him that gives nor him that takes. One could not hope to solve a practical problem so vast and complex as this in a few minutes' discussion; but we may get hints and admoni- tions that shall serve us for guidance in our daily choices, and some such meditation may be useful as we make up our plans for the years before us. First, then we may say that getting material things just for the sake of getting them or of hav- ing them is not worth while. There are many with whom this is the ruling motive. It is often concealed, it is rarely avowed, but it is the real motive in many strenuous lives. To argue about it is surely needless. It is sufficient to call at- tention to it as one of the portentous and de- structive delusions by which our human nature is constantly beguiled. That men outside of the lunatic asylum should expend the energies of their lives in heaping up money and material gains just for the sake of heaping them up; or accumulating vast wealth which they know that they can never WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? 69 use; in simply gratifying the craving for accumu- lation is, when you stop to think about it, a most astonishing fact. And yet I suppose about ninety- nine in every hundred of our population really regard those who are doing this thing as the most successful men of the day. The man who succeeds in getting a vast amount of property which he knows that he can never use, all of which he ex- pects to leave behind him when he dies — this is the successful man, according to the world's standard. And there is a vast multitude who think that this is the only thing that is really worth while. With such a habit of mind it is vain to argue. If a man should have one hundred oxen roasted for his individual dinner every day, when he knew that he could not eat more than one pound of beef; or if he should require the tailor to provide him with a thousand new suits of clothing every day, when he knew that he could not without great trouble wear more than two or three of them, we should say that he gave evidence of insanity. Such an enormous over-provision for personal wants betokens, we should say, an unsound mind. Is it really any more rational to make the same kind of preposterous provision for the wants of a lifetime — to heap up millions and tens and hun- dreds of millions for which, in the delver's own day, he can have no possible use. What kind of 70 COMMENCEMENT DAYS craze is in the head of the man that makes him think this worth while? Often those who are subject to this strong delusion justify themselves by saying that this extravagant provision is for their children. But here again the question returns: Is this worth while? Is it a good thing for children to deliver them from labor and care and responsibility — to take away from them the opportunities of man- hood and womanhood? My own observation would lead me to believe that fully four-fifths of those who inherit fortunes are hurt more than they are helped by them. It is only the excep- tional few who are not weakened and demoralized by such inheritance. I saw, one day, a photo- graph of a little lad of whom one said to me: "The boy has how three hundred thousand dollars, well- invested, in his own right; by the time he is of age it will be a large fortune; if only it doesn't ruin himl" It was a shrewd man of the world who said it and there was sadness in his tone. If I were in the business of insuring boys against physical and moral shipwreck, I think I should make the rates lower to healthy boys in the Children's Home than to boys on the Boulevard. Is it worth while to heap up riches for your chil- dren, when there are about four chances out of five that they will do them more harm than good? WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? yi Others are straining to accumulate large wealth because they wish to secure an amount of capital whose income will suffice to maintain them in comfort and perhaps in luxury without encroach- ing upon the principal. But is this worth while? Why insist on having so much that you must leave behind? It is worth while to lay by enough to maintain yourself in comfort, in case of sick- ness or disability: but a very moderate hoard would answer that purpose, if you calculated on using it during your lifetime, and not merely the income from it. But, at present rates of interest, it takes a pretty large sum to yield an Income sufficient for the maintenance of life. Is it worth while to try? That is the practical question. Would you not be wiser to content yourself with that which will probably suffice to keep you in comfort while you live, putting the energy of your life, after that is gained, into some other kind of enterprise than that of accumulation? I have no doubt that this question appears to some of you altogether sentimental and quixotic; the proposition thus to limit by a rational pur- pose the acquisition of wealth — to make money the servant of need and not the instrument of greed — will seem wholly unpractical. To bring Mammon down from his throne and make him the mere minister to our convenience and comfort 72 COMMENCEMENT DAYS will appear to many the reversal of the chief aim of life. But is it worth while after all to be the bond-slave of Mammon ? Is it worth while, as Mr. deed puts it to the Kansas farmers, " to be always raising more corn, to fatten more hogs, to buy more land, to raise more corn" et ad infinitum. And the same kind of treadmill is for every man whose main concern is making money, whether the dreary round is corn and hogs and land, or whether it is raw material and machinery and goods. Is it worth while? that is the question I am trying to get before your mind. How much of this is worth while.? Are there any limits here, and if so where are they.? Probably very few of those who listen to me have yet reached the point where accumulation has not some relation to actual or probable need. But the time may come to some of us when it will be a practical question whether we shall heap up money to leave behind us. And before that time comes it is well to have a clear under- standing with ourselves as to whether or not it is worth while. Let us go a step further, then, and say that it is worth while to live; that it is therefore worth while to accumulate the means of living; but that it is not worth while to multiply means which can never be used, or to turn the means WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? 73 of living into the end of life and thus invert the very order of existence. If a man has a well he needs a rope and a bucket; but he does not need a hundred thousand bales of rope and a million buckets to draw water out of this one well. It is worth while to live, I say. And what does this involve.^ It means, first, the possession of a healthy and vigorous body. Steady nerves, good digestion, abundant physical strength and endurance — this is always worth while. We are justified in think- ing of this, in caring for it, in providing for our- selves, so far as we are able, the food and the fresh air and the exercise and the genial surround- ings which minister to health. The discipline which gives bodily vigor is never to be despised unless it unduly exalts bodily vigor. It is worth while to be athletic but it is not worth while to be an athlete; for an athlete is apt to be one to whom the strength and agility of the body have become the principal thing. Here, again, ends are sacrificed to means. The body at its best estate is servant and not master: the athlete inverts the order of nature. Nothing is worth while which tends to put the lesser above the greater or to discrown the royalty of the human soul. 74 COMMENCEMENT DAYS It IS worth while to have a well filled and a well trained mind. Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom, and with all thy gettings get understanding. Many of the things you get in your exchanges you may well let go at less than cost: but the wise man bids you buy the truth and sell it not. Here is one commodity of which you can never have too much and with which you cannot afford to part at any price. Mental equipment consists of knowledge and discipline. To know facts that are worth know- ing; to know what they mean and how they are related to each other; to know how to observe and to compare and to weigh and judge and reason — this is the mental equipment which we do well to covet. To know facts which are worth knowing. A vast amount of that which is thrust upon you, which clamors for your attention, which screams at you in the headlines and prattles to you in the parlors, and jabbers at you in the gossip of the society columns, Is decidedly not worth knowing; nay, the effect of It upon your mind must be much the same as would be the effect upon your stomach of a diet of sawdust garnished with cayenne pepper. We are sometimes told by the realists that all facts are significant. Possibly, in some aspects, WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? 75 for some minds, and for some purposes; but far the larger part of the mere details of other peo- ple's domestic and personal concerns are not only of no significance to you but you are be- fouled and belittled by the knowledge of them. Not all the facts of nature are worth knowing. The garbage pile in your back alley is a fact, but knowledge of the exact composition of it would not add to your wisdom. Out of the mul- titude of things knowable let us try to fill our minds with things worth knowing. There is a sectarianism of culture which we shall do well to avoid. Each specialist in knowl- edge has his own notion of what is worth knowing and often has scant regard for that which lies outside his lines. The man of science often sneers at philosophy and history and literature; and they of the other guilds undervalue his pur- suits. But we must not disparage any of these. Science gives us the facts in their relations; philosophy tells us what they mean. It is worth while to know all we can about the interplay of the natural forces, about the processes of life, about the manner in which living things have come to be. Great and wonderful are the revela- tions of the telescope and the microscope and the spectroscope, of the combustion tube and the retort, of the geologist's rock hammer and the 76 COMMENCEMENT DAYS archaeologist's spade. And if this is God's world; if Nature is only the loom whose shuttles of force are weaving for God the garment by which we see him, then all this knowledge when it is set in order, and its relations are understood, must bring us into the very presence chamber of the Creator himself. A little of this kind of learning may be a dangerous thing; but the complete induction will bring the irresistible conviction that we are evermore in the presence of Him in whom we live and move and have our being. But we must not forget that he who lives and works in Nature lives also and reveals himself even more clearly in the lives of the men who are made in his image. Here is a revelation of him far more important to us than that which is made along the lines of the physical forces. Through the movements of the tribes and the peoples, their crude endeavors after domestic relations and social unities, the operation of those attractions of community and fraternity which have been extending and strengthening from millennium to millennium, we see the pa- tient love of God educating his children, and leading them on in the way of life. The dis- asters and overturnings that overtake them are simply the signs of his presence among them — the chastenings of a Father who loves his children WHAT IS WORTH WHILE ? J'J too well to let them go to ruin, without many sharp reminders of their folly. And therefore the whole of history, when broadly and carefully studied, is but the record of revelation; the in- stinctive and spontaneous movements of men toward unity and co-operation are the outworking of the divine thought implanted in their nature; and the retributions and overturnings are all signs of the Presence of one who worketh ac- cording to the counsel of his will in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; all point onward to "One far off divine event To which the whole creation moves." And not less clearly is this revelation made in the great literatures of the world. The greatest of these we call the sacred literatures. They are not all alike; they are not of equal value; if you wish to know which is best study their fruits in the lives of the peoples. There is truth in all of them; in every one of them thoughts of God have struggled into utterance; there is not one of them which is not somewhat obscured by the human medium through which it has come; but there are great differences among them; in some the light shines far more clearly than in others. In these last days they are brought together and 78 COMMENCEMENT DAYS compared as never before in history: each must shine by its own light: each must endure the test of comparison with all the others. The law of the survival of the fittest is now at work among them. Are any of you in doubt as to the outcome of this conflict.^ In the great literatures of the world the Spirit of all truth must surely be revealing himself. Where else can we learn so much concerning him as in the thoughts of the men who are made for fellowship with him, and with whom he holds communion? There may be error and aberration here, "For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool," — but through all these reflections and refractions the Light that lighteth every man finds its way into the world. It is in the realm of the spirit that God, who is a Spirit, most clearly reveals himself; and literature contains the record of the realm of the spirit. The one thing most im- portant for us to know is what the best men — those nearest to God — have thought and felt in all the ages. There is nothing therefore which it is so well worth while for us to know as the great sacred literatures — and, of course, the greatest and the best of them is that which we WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? 79 ought first and most thoroughly to know. And if there ever was upon the earth, as I believe there was, One whose unique function it was to manifest God in the life of a man, then the one thing best worth knowing is the revelation that was made in his words and his life. Of all knowledges this must be supreme. Of all kinds of ignorance, that which obscures this light must be most melancholy. It is worth while for Chris- tian men to know their Bible, and to know all that it can tell them about Him who, by the con- fession of the world's greatest minds, is the Light of the world. No other literature, I say, can be of so great value to us as that which brings to us the revela- tion of God in Christ. But there is much besides this which It is well worth our while to know, because It discloses to us the history of the human soul, which, of all histories, Is the most Instructive and the most stirring. The epics, the dramas, the songs, the romances show us the human soul grappling with the great problems of duty and destiny, seeking to fathom the mysteries of life, trying to reconcile Its contradictions and to answer its deepest questions. They are not all of equal value; many of them do little more than make the darkness visible; there Is need here, also, of rigid selection; but in the best of them 8o COMMENCEMENT DAYS there is great illumination and stimulus; he who knows little or nothing of the friendships of the best books is deprived of one of the great sources of enjoyment and inspiration. It is worth while to have not merely the cogni- tive powers of the mind disciplined for the in- vestigation of Truth, but the taste and the imagination also trained for the perception and enjoyment of the Beautiful. Something of that we gain through our knowledge of the best litera- ture; but other forms of beauty than those which are expressed in words appeal to us on every side, and it is well worth while to be fitted to respond to their appeal. Beauty, not less than Truth and Love is a divine attribute: no man knows God, in any adequate sense, whose soul is not keenly responsive to all forms of beauty. And this responsiveness can be cultivated, just as much as the muscles can be strengthened or the mathematical powers developed. Some are by nature more sensitive to this revelation than others, but there are few who may not greatly increase their power of enjoying the beautiful. And if it be the chief end of man to glorify God and enjoy him forever, then it must be worth while to qualify ourselves for that revelation of God in the Beauty of Nature which is of all the direct disclosures of him in the natural world WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? 8 1 the one most clear and most inspiring. We may sometimes question the goodness of God as Nature reveals him, but his beauty who can gainsay? And it is well worth our while to have a mind and a heart on which these manifestations of the divine glory quickly impress themselves; a nature sensitive to the light and shadow, the form and color, the melody and harmony of this wonderful world; a soul that is sensitive to the touch of those influences by which God makes himself known to us in the works of his hands. Surely it is worth while in these bountiful summer days to take the gifts of God so freely proffered, the blooms of meadow and garden, the grandeurs of forest and mountain, the glories of sea and sky — to open the heart to the grace which comes to enrich and inspire and ennoble us, to cleanse our thoughts from the defilement of earth's selfishnesses and vanities, to make us free of that realm where nothing sordid or cruel is ever per- mitted to enter. Finally, let me say, it is worth while to enter fully into all the significance of the truth that no man liveth to himself. Not merely to truth and beauty must the soul be responsive, but, above all, to the claims of humanity. No man truly lives who does not accept the great opportunities and responsibilities of our common life. It is 82 COMMENCEMENT DAYS worth while for every man to take his part man- fully in the tasks that belong to us as social beings. To live an isolated life, a life whose motives and aims and ends are all within itself is very de- cidedly not worth while. It is not only unprofit- able, it is impossible. There are some who seem to try to be as exclusive as they can, and the penalty is a desolation more terrible than death, for the soul thus shut out from her kind, knows the doom so vividly delineated in the Palace of Art. "She mouldering with the dull earth's mouldering sod, Inwrapt tenfold in slothful shame, Lay there exiled from the eternal God, Lost to her place and name; "And death and life she hated equally, And nothing saw for her despair But dreadful time, dreadful eternity, No comfort anywhere: "Remaining utterly confused with fears, And ever worse with growing time, And ever unrelieved by dismal fears, And all alone in crime." No: There are no possibilities of happiness for human souls in this or any other world save those which bind them close together in human fellow- ship, which make the welfare of all the supreme WHAT IS WORTH WHILE? 83 concern of each. This means that the burdens of all must rest upon the heart of each: that the battles of all must enlist the courage and endurance of each. It means conflict, sacrifice, suffering for every one. It is idle to imagine that we can separate ourselves from our kind and go on and up to fortune and happiness leaving the rest behind; we may wish to do it but we shall not be able: that fortune will have a curse at the heart of it, and that happiness will be mildewed and cankered, and the curse and the blight will find us sure, in this world or another. Do you imagine that you can tamper with the eternal Righteous- ness.^ No; it is not worth while to try to live in this world as though you owed nothing to your neighbor; that debt of love is never remitted, and there is no bankrupt's court in the eternities in which you can get your discharge; you must pay it before you will ever enter into peace or freedom. But it is worth while to acknowledge it here and now, and to pay it promptly and freely. Nothing is so well worth while for any of us as to accept with gladness all the responsibilities that belong to our common life and to play our part in them like men. So then we may answer our question, "What is worth while.'"' by saying. It is worth while to 84 COMMENCEMENT DAYS live; and life means a body sound and strong to serve the soul; a mind stored with highest truth and trained for noblest service; a soul quick and ; sensitive to the beauty of the universe; a heart attuned to the love that is the fulfilling of the law of heaven and earth. The greatest of these elements of life is love. I I "For life with all it yields of joy and woe, \ And hope and fear — believe the aged friend — Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love, How love might be, hath been, indeed, and is." That is the one certain, indubitable, all inclusive good. "For every one that loveth is begotten of God and knoweth God." That is the one thing that makes life worth while. And all the worlds, and all the constellations and all the eternities are worthless, where love is not. IV SOME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED IV SOME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED IN these extremely practical remarks I am going to try to tell you who are looking for- ward to the business of life some of the things I have learned in my business. I am a minister of the gospel; that is my business; but I am not go- ing to talk about the ministry as a profession, nor about the subjects with which the minister deals; I am going to bring you some of the lessons of life which I have learned in my calling and which are applicable to men in all callings. I have learned, for one thing, the value of punctuality. That was a lesson I had to learn. I was somewhat addicted, in my youth, and in my early ministry, to dilatoriness. I think that I must have belonged to the class which some one has described as three-handed people — two hands and a little behind-hand. I was often behind time in getting to church, and to prayer-meeting, and other appointments. I never meant to be, but there were always a number of last things to do, which had been put off, and the consequence was that I was often mortified on getting to 87 88 COMMENCEMENT DAYS church and finding that the congregation had been waiting for me perhaps five or ten minutes. After a few experiences of this kind I saw that this would never do; that my habits in this re- spect must be thoroughly reformed, and they were reformed. I have learned the importance of being on time, and there are few occasions when anything is depending on me, upon which I am not on time. The lesson is worth learning. It Is, indeed, a valuable moral lesson. The lack of promptness and punctuality is a serious fault. It is a bad kind of selfishness. The indolence or careless- ness which makes you tardy Is a species of self- indulgence, and when others are depending on you and waiting for you, you are taking your ease at their expense. It is not honest. You are robbing them of what may be very valuable. If you are a just-minded person, you will not do it. Another thing that I have learned Is the value of work. If I have made any success in life it has been won by steady, patient, unflinching work. It isn't due to genius, for I am not a genius; nor to luck, for I have had no favors from for- tune; nor to station and influence, for I had to make my way up from the humblest conditions; but simply to the capacity for patient and sus- tained industry. BO ME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED 89 Doubtless there are some among you who think that a man In my calling can know very little about what work means. Shortly after I had finished my college course, as I was riding one day with a farmer of my acquaintance, on his buckboard, from the village to my home in the country, the farmer asked me v/hether I had got through school. I told him that I had finished my college course. "Goin' to school any more.^" he queried. "Not just yet." "What are you goin' to do now.?" "I expect to work awhile." "Work, eh.? What are you goin' to work at.?" "I think I shall teach school." "Laws! Ye don't call that work, do ye.?" Well, I had taught school already enough to be able to tell him that, although I had had abundant experience of the hardest kinds of work on a farm, I had never, in any long summer day's work plowing or hoeing corn, or mowing grass or cradling oats or rye been so utterly fagged out as I had been at the end of some school days. But, of course, he could not understand that at all. It is true, however, that for a man whose oc- cupation is intellectual, the capacity for hard and steady work is just as essential as for a man in any kind of manual labor. 90 COMMENCEMEN T DA YS The ability to work means just this — ability to hold yourself down to your task, whatever it may be, till it is done, and thoroughly done. For if a man's tasks are Intellectual, there is just as much temptation to idleness, or dawdling, or desultorlness, as there is if he is working with his hands. If a man is studying a difficult subject, it is easy to relax his hold upon it and let his mind wander off in reverie, or be drawn this way and that by all sorts of side issues. If he is writing a sermon or an essay, he may get tired of thinking it out, and may pick up a newspaper, or a maga- zine, or he may take a notion to go down street and see somebody; he may even go off driving or fishing; there are all sorts of temptations to neg- lect the work in hand. And it is true, I fear, that in various kinds of intellectual dissipation — in idle- ness and gossip and lazy self-indulgence — a good many students waste a large portion of their hours. Now, if I have had any success in my calling it has come from a steadily increasing power to hold myself right down to my work; to shut out of my mind the solicitations of ease and relaxa- tion; to fix my attention on the business in hand and stick to it till it Is finished. I have known quite a number of men. In my own calling, whose failure, or very limited success, has been due to a lack of understanding of this great fact. SOME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED 91 I want to say, also, that I have found hard work good for the health. My physical vigor, my power of endurance, is greater now than it was thirty or forty years ago. I am doing more hours work in a week and doing it more easily now than in the first ten years of my ministry. I believe that there is nothing better than the consciousness of good work, well done, to keep a man's mind cheer- ful and contented; and when your mind is serene, your body is much more likely to be in good con- dition. Another lesson that I have learned is that It pays for an employe to do his level best all the while for his employer. You know, of course, that I have been an employe all my life; I have been working in that capacity about fifty-five years; I have never been in business for myself. My employers for most of that time have been corporations, for a church, you know, is a corporation. Four years of the time my employer was the publisher of a great weekly newspaper, of which I was one of the editors; the rest of the time I have been in the employ of churches. So far as the ruling principle of conduct is concerned, I do not think that there has been any difference between my newspaper work and my church work. I tried, I know, while I was work- 92 COMMENCEMENT DAYS ing for the newspaper publisher, to do my level best every day. For this I had no credit; my name never appeared in connection with my work; nobody outside of the office knew what or how much I did; but I am sure that it was my honest purpose to give that publisher every week the very best fruits of my best thinking; to do a little better work every week than I had done the week before. No fault was ever found, so far as I know, with the quantity or the quality of my work. When I laid it down, it was not because my employer wished it, but for reasons of my own. It isn't any easier, I want to tell you, to work for a corporate employer, like a church, than for an individual employer. If you think it is, just notice how short the pastorates are in most of the churches. Plainly, it isn't easy to suit this many- headed employer. Doubtless the ministers some- times give up their work because they are not satisfied, but the relation is very often termi- nated because the church is not satisfied. You may think that the minister has it all in his own hands, but that is not true. "How is your church getting along.?" some one asked a good old colored minister. *' Church.? I ain't got no church," was the re- ply- "What's the matter?" SOME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED 93 "O, when I was out of town last week, they sent me in my resignation." White churches as well as colored churches have ways of doing that — more delicate ways, but still effectual ways. And it becomes a serious practical question for every minister — as it is for every other employe — to maintain right relations between himself and his employer, relations which look to permanence and satisfaction and peace. Here, now, I am sure, it has been the constant and ruling purpose of my life to do my very best for my employer, to render the best service of which I am capable; not to spare myself, not to shirk work, but to do a little better work every year than I did the year before. I believe that every employer that I have had will testify that this has been my rule of life. This is the doctrine that I preach: That every man, in every relation of life, instead of striving to get as much as he can, should reverse that order and give as much as he can for what he gets. That, as I understand it. Is the Christian law of life; I preach it because I cannot find in the New Testament anything else to preach, and I have tried to practice it. I know that it has been my honest purpose, in my work as a minister, not to look for soft snaps and easy berths, but 94 COMMENCEMENT DAYS to study how I could do more, give more, serve more acceptably. I don't boast of this, because, as I understand the Gospel, this is the very least that a man can do who wants to follow Jesus /Christ. "I came," said Jesus, "not to be ministered unto, but to minister; not to be served, but to serve; not to get, but to give;" and the man who follows him, even if he follows him a great way off, must yet have this before him as the thing he means to do. When I was a young minister, and a very hum- ble and obscure minister, I met one night, on a Hudson river boat, a well known pastor of a strong church in New York City, whom I knew a very little. The great man was quite gracious to the neophyte; he sat down by me and talked for a little while quite confidentially. Among other things, he asked me if I had paid my fare on the boat. I told him that I had. "Well," he said, "I have the good fortune to have a parishioner who has some interest in this steamboat company, and he got me a pass. I am often able, by making my wants known, to get advantages of this sort. It pays to do it. You can greatly reduce your expenses in such ways. And," he continued in an undertone, "I have this piece of advice to give you: Learn SOME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED 95 to accept favors! In your ministry you will often find it very profitable." I made no reply. He was a great man, and it was not for me to challenge his counsel; but my answer, under my breath, was very prompt: *'Not if I know myself! I'm not in this world on that business. Going about, like a Buddhist mendicant, with an alms bowl, isn't my task. I propose to do as many favors as I can and to demand as few." This has been the principle on which I have dealt with my employers. I have tried to find ways of giving them, constantly, more and more of my time, of my strength, of my service. And I want to testify that it pays. I am not rich, of course; no man ever got very rich who followed that rule; but I have managed to get a very comfortable living, and I have had a good time. No man ever had a better. My work has been a blessing and a benediction to me, from beginning to end. I have had many struggles and discouragements, of course; but the joy of the work has been all the while an ex- ceeding great reward. The kindness, the friend- ship which has been my portion wherever I have lived have made my life a very happy one. Perhaps you think that the minister's case is exceptional; that while this rule of life would 96 COMMENCEMENT DAYS work in my calling it wouldn't work in yours. There are some differences, of course; but not radical differences. Churches are made up of folks, nothing else. There is a lot of human nature in them. They are apt to behave much like other employers. And I believe, from the bottom of my heart, that the rule which I have tried to follow is the right rule for every employe to follow in his rela- tions with his employer — not to see how much he can get out of him and how little he can give in return, but how much he can give of loyal, hearty, efficient service. It is the right thing for every employe of the city to do, from the street sweeper up to the mayor; and for every employe of the state and of the nation. It is the right rule for every man who works for another, or has any kind of business dealings with another, to give that other just as much as he can of service for what he receives. It is the Christian rule, I know, and the Christian rule must be the right rule. We are not, of course, to overwork or injure ourselves in this endeavor and thus impair our power of service, but we are honestly to strive in every relation of life to give to all with whom we deal as much as we can in the service which they engage us to perform. SOME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED 97 If, instead of trying to get as much as he could for himself out of all his dealings with his neigh- bors and to give as little as he could in exchange therefor, everybody tried to give as much as he could, this would surely be a very happy world. If everybody followed this rule, this earth would be heaven. Well, if it is right for everybody it must be right for you and me. The fact that other people refuse to obey it does not excuse us. If heaven ever comes to earth — and it is com- ing — it will be when each one of us makes up his mind to live the life that everybody ought to live, without waiting for anybody. This then, young men, I give you as the best wisdom I have won in my life work. Some things I am not very sure about, but this thing I know. I know that this is the right way to live. I know that the right thing for every young man to say to himself is something like this: ^^One thing I am resolved upon: I will not he a sponge or a parasite. I will give an honest equiva- lent for what I get. I want no man^s money for which I havenh rendered a full return. "/ want no wages that I havenH earned. If I work for any man, or any company, or any institu- tion, I will render a full, ample, generous service. If I work for the city, or the state, or the nation, 98 COMMENCEMENT DAYS it shall have my best thought, my best effort, my most conscientious and efficient endeavor. "No man, no body of men, shall ever be made poorer by their dealings with me; if I can give a little more than I get every time, in that shall be my happiness. The great commonwealth of human society shall not be the loser through me. I will take good care to put into the common fund more than I take out." "That young men, is the right life to live. If you want to know what true happiness is; if you want to find the path that shineth more and more unto the perfect day; if you want to see, as the shadows lengthen, the evening sky kindling with a glory such as the noonday never saw, and to feel, as life draws near its end that it has been a beautiful thing to live — so beautiful that there must be given to life the glory of going on — heed this word that I have spoken and walk in this way that I have shown you!" V SHORT CUTS SHORT CUTS X is a privilege which I value that I may say .^■^^^■j.i^yf^ to the memhers ■ of this graduating class' "a" ^ • few words at the close of their college life, and'-their entrance upon larger responsibilities. I am not going to try to discuss any large ab- stract or philosophic theme; I doubt if you are in the mood to listen to such a discussion; but I should like to help you, if I could, to get hold of an idea which will stay with you as long as you live and help you in solving the practical prob- lems of life. ^, ,,^ ., What I want to speak to you about this meffi^ ing is the futility of short cuts to success or prosperity; the folly and the sin of trying to get something for nothing; the wisdom of paying full price for all the goods and gains of life. Here is one great principle under several phases: it is the law of moral equivalents, it is the principle of justice which I am going to commend to you, which I wish that you may always honor and never evade. Taking first the homely figure of the short lOI I02 COMMENCEMENT DAYS cut, It Is very Important to remember that there is wisdom In the paradox of the ancient proverb, The farthest way around Is the nearest way home. It Is the converse of this that an old philosopher expressed when he said, *'He that hasteth with his feet misseth the way." The eager, headlong runner easily loses the road. The common ex- perience of the race has condensed the same thought Into various proverbs: "Haste makes waste;" and still more explicitly "The more haste the less speed." The same uncontrollable eager- ness which pushes us on at a breakneck pace in the beaten track leads us also to depart from the beaten track In search of more direct paths. Short cuts are sought to every goal. The dis- position to disregard the lessons of experience, to avoid the ways in which prudent men have trod, and to strike out for ourselves new routes to every object of desire is a trait of human nature which Is rather Inordinately developed In this age and In this land. Most true It is that a trait quite akin to this is the source of invention and discovery and the parent of our modern progress; every device by which machinery Is Improved Is a short cut to production; the spinning jenny and the power loom are short cuts of the manufacturers; the telegraph and the telephone are short cuts of communication; stenography Is the penman's 1 SHORT CUTS 103 short cut; and the marvellous success of these devices has helped to fill all our heads with schemes for shortening all processes and getting at the results of work by more expeditious methods. This is really what we are after, most of us, — contrivances to save time. The patent expert in the story of *'Metzerott Shoemaker," explaining to a poor inventor why his new machine with many similar ones, didn't succeed, thus moralizes: "They save muscle, of course; but you see, most of us have muscle, and very few of us money. That's about the rights of it, I guess. If they'd saved time, now, or money, 'twould have been different. . . . Well, don't be discour- aged: go home and invent something that is cheap to make, and that knocks Father Time into the middle of next week — some improvement in the telegraph for instance, so a man can hear y'esterday how stocks stood day after to-morrow, and you'll make a fortune yet." It is well, however, to understand that while , some processes may be hastened and some roads shortened, this method has its limitations. There ; are processes which cannot with prudence be ;^ abridged. There are roads which, although circui- tous and toilsome, are as direct as they can be made. Attempts to abbreviate these processes or to shorten these roads will always be foolish and 104 COMMENCEMENT DAYS sometimes hazardous. The ingestion and the digestion of the food necessary for the sustenance of the body requires a certain amount of time. It is not wise to try to reduce the time. The man who swallows his dinner in three minutes and expects to have it all assimilated into muscle and bone in ten minutes more is not a wise man. No invention will ever be made by which these processes can be greatly shortened. Nature will insist on taking time to do her work. When you attempt to hasten her gait she has her own revenges. So, the growth of most organisms follows its own law, and cannot be expedited. It takes, ordinarily, from sixteen to twenty years for the human body to attain to its full stature: the at- tempt to bring it to maturity in six or eight years will scarcely be made by intelligent persons. There is no short cut to manhood or woman- hood. You must wait for the slow processes of physical development. You may sing, with Jean Ingelow's "Seven Times Two": "I wish and I wish that the spring would go faster, Nor long summer bide so late, — And that I might grow on like the foxglove and aster, For some things are ill to wait," — but your songs and your longings will not avail. Some things do not like to wait, but wait they SHORT CUTS 105 must. Waiting is as truly part of the discipline of life as work is, a discipline full of profit to all of us. In the commonest experiences of life we are con- tinually encountering this fact that the attempt to shorten processes is foolish and even dangerous. That proverb we have quoted about the farthest way around epibodies a great deal of homely wisdom. I hsiv^ had considerable experience in tramping for pleasure through mountainous districts, and I have generally found it easier and wiser to follow the roads, and to eschew short cuts. You discover, from some height, that your road is very circuitous,^-that you might by striking directly across couhtry save a great deal of distance, but if you try it you are almost sure to come to grief. The ditches, streams, swamps, thickets, through which you musiiorce your way, more than offset by their difficulties your gains of distance. Those of the party who stick to the beaten path are apt to come out ahe^d, in better condition. The fact is that the road, almost always, represents the results of experiei^ice. The engineering by which it was laid out may not always be scientific, but it is generally p^-actical and sensible. There is good reason why itVollows this route, — reason which the traveler who for the first time is traversing it may not see, but lo6 COMMENCEMENT DAYS which he would see if he took pains to study the problem. The presumption always is that it is better to stick to the road. But while short cuts in our excursions afoot are thus seen ;to be generally inadvisable, they are manifestly! impossible when we are traveling by carriage. Then the road is the only practic- able route. Ijt is only where roads exist that such iocomotif)n is possible. The road is, in most countries, the correlative of the vehicle. The one implies the other. The attempt to use the vehicle anywhere else except upon the highway would be highly inexpedient. The traveler who took down the fences and started off across the lots to shorten the distance would be considered msane. \ The more highly organised and complicated our methods of lotomotion are, the more necessary it is that we stick to the road, circuitous and toil- some though it be, and avoid "^11 short cuts. On the prairie the! pioneer with his, buckboard may venture sometimes to leave the trail and strike across the country; but the locomotive engineer has no choice: there is only one road for him; he must keep on the track. Suppose that the loco- motive engineer on the Pennsylvania Railway should attempt to take his train from the top of the Allegheny mountains straight across to SHORT CUTS 107 Altoon a, — avoid ing, by a short cut, the Horse- / y shoe Bend ! _ ^ ''-"^* npiipQP i'11nQtr?^w^ ^hnw thfl^ attempts to annihilate time and distance are often not merely ill-advised and inexpedient but positively rash and wicked. There are distances that cannot be re- duced, without rushing to destruction. There is many and many a short cut which is only another name for homicide or suicide. And this is even more true of morals than of physics. When God says, "This is the way; walk ye in it," do you never undertake to find a short cut. The way may be long and devious, — but there is no other road to happiness. There may be an- other way that seems to you pleasanter and more direct, but the end thereof are the ways of death. Let me make two or three plain applications of this principle. The first is a caution to those who seek to dis- pense with the needful discipline and training by which they are prepared for usefulness. There are a good many callings for which men need thorough and careful preparation. Success and happiness depend upon it. A certain amount of knowledge, of manual skill, of practical experi- ence are required for such callings, and there is no way in which all these qualifications can be Io8 COMMENCEMENT DAYS acquired without taking time, and passing through the necessary training. The young physician is sometimes tempted to take a short cut into his profession. Perhap/he is poor and does not feel able to afford the/time and the money necessary for the long cojlrse of study; perhaps he is sordid, and wanj?s to be making money; perhaps he is very philanthropic and longs to be actively at work, relieving suf- fering; perhaps he\is lazy and do^^ not like to study; for some or ^1 of these re^'sons he wants to cut his preparatoi*,y studies ^hort and begin practicing medicine at once. /But the folly of such haste as this is evident .enough to anybody. The regular course is aU t6o short, if the time be well improved, to gai^^ the knowledge of the human body — its functions, its maladies, and the natural remedial agents and their action by which a man is fitted for such responsible work as this. The longet I live the more tremendous seem to me the responsibilities which the physi- cian assumes. I do not see how any man can undertake them, at all, except as a matter of sol- emn duty. To follow medicine merely as a means of gaining a livelihood, with no benevolent or philanthropic motive — seems to me monstrous, almost as horrible as it would be to follow the ministerial calling in the same way. If the main / / SHORT CUTS I 109 motive were to save life, or to alleviate suffering, then I can understand how one might choose this calling. I can appreciate the heroism, the self- devotion of one who for humanity's sake, for love's sake, takes this solemn charge upon his soul. But, then I cannot understand how any- one should be willing to assume it without fitting himself by the most patient and thorough study for these momentous duties. A short cut to such responsibilities ^(sems to me almost unconceivable. With most of the professions the case is much the same. I think that a man who takes a short cut even to the profession of an architect or a civil engineer has but a dim conception of human responsibility. WheiX some crushing arch or tottering wall buries aSscore of men beneath its ruins, or some falling bridge plunges a railway train into the abyss, the penalty of such haste is duly registered. And I must own that I am not very enthusiastic over the short cuts by which some of our zealous friends propose to send men into the Christian ministry. This is not the day for callow preachers with a smattering of Scripture and a few scraps of philosophy. There never was a time when the man of God had greater need to be thoroughly furnished for his work. Men are sometimes pushed into the ministry with insufficient prep- no COMMENCEMENT DAYS aration, and are compelled to go on with their work as best tkey can; but I never knew a wise and strong manVvho had suffered this fate who had not all his lif^ deplored it. No matter how much preparation the minister may have had, the subjects with wn\ch he is called to deal are so vast that he C)f ten s^nds appalled before them, and wishes that he might have weeks or months instead of days for their study. And no wise young man, if he can help himself, will greatly abridge his preparatory studies for this profes- sion. The shrewd remark of President Finney to the youth who wanted to skip a year of his course at Oberlin is worth remembering, *' What's your hurry?" asked the President. *'0, I am so anxious to get to work," said the youth; "I want to save souls." "Young man," said the Doctor, "if the Lord had wanted you to go to saving souls a year sooner, he'd have made you a year sooner." A much more serious error is that of the mul- titude who are searching for short cuts to fortune. This is, indeed, tl^ie one great fault, the besetting sin of our land and'^Hr age. If there is one object of desire that is more ri'e^rly universal than any other it is probably this— to find some quick passage to opulence. Very few indeed of the multitude are willing to accumulate a competence SHORTCUTS III slowly, by steady work and patient saving: the craving is for rapid gains, sudden affluence, im- mediate success. So many persons by lucky ventures of one kind or another, by the unearned Increment of land that has quickly risen to fabiilpus values in the sudden growth of cities; by thesliscovery of minerals; by lucky or rascally manlpula^Hmi of the stock or the grain-market; by the *'reor^i^nizatIon" of corporations, and the monstrous inflaffc^n of capital; by corrupt and unprincipled bargaiiN^^with legislatures or city councils, or railway man^^^s, have risen almost in a day, from penury Ao a'fik.^nce, that the imagination of the wh9ie multitimbv^s excited, and there are hundre^i^s of thousands wkp are burning to go and do likewise. To get rich quickly; to discover'the secret of Midas; to go from the bottom to the top of the ladder at a single bound — this is the one strong craving that masters the souls of the multitude. It is by this that the gambling propensity is mainly stimu- lated; the *' speculators," |or "operators," as they euphemistically name themselves, in stock and grain, and pork, and oil, — as well as the habitues of the faro banks and the purchasers of lottery tickets are all hoping that by some fortunate venture, some lucky turn, they will mount to sudden fortune. And the gambling spirit is 1 1 2 COMMENCEMENT DAYS more and more pervading every kind of business. The craving for rapid and chance accumula- tions, for gains that have not been gathered by legitimate enterprise, but have been won by bold strokes and masterly combinations, amounts to a popular mania. "He that maketh haste to be rich," says the wise man, "shall not be innocent." The proverb has, alas, too abundant verification. The eager- ness for sudden gain confuses men's notions of right and wrong, and the short cut to fortune often leads directly across the lines of integrity. God's law and man's law are trampled under foot in the headlong pursuit of riches. The restless bank cashier, unwilling to wait for the slow accu- mulation of a competency by savings from his salary, abstracts from the vault the funds of the bank to use in speculations, loses them, and confesses his crinie either by flight or by suicide. "He that hasteth with his feet misseth the way," — a fatal miss assuredly. The contractor, eager to multiply his gains, builds with frail lumber and untempered mortar, and the tottering tenement,\burying in its ruins a hundred lives, is the witness of his crime. The greedy manufacturer, that he ijiay undersell the market, forces the wages of his working women below starvation point, and the graves in the SHORTCUTS 113 Potters Field and the orphans in the Children's Home cry to heaven against his extortion. There Is one fact which those who seek to get rich suddenly should bear In mind; namely, that wealth Is largely, — I will not say wholly, but mainly — the fruit of labor. The attempt to get possession of wealth, by master strokes, by sudden luck, without rendering therefor a fair equivalent, is the attempt to get the results of labor without giving to labor a just reward. That, after all, is about what It reduces to. The man who suddenly accumulates vast wealth has succeeded In approprlXtIng the fruits of other men's labors without rendering to them an ade- quate compensation. The wealth that is In his possession was produced by\the labor of a great multitude. How did he get 'it .^ He got it by luck or by trickery, or by robbery — legalized robbery of course. He did not "give for it any equivalent of goods or services. Therefore those who created it cannot have received any adequate return for their labor. Is it not plain that he who maketh haste to be rich cannot be innocent.? All who value their own souls must shun these short cuts to fortune. No gains are worth having save those which are won by Industry and fru- gality and legitimate enterprise. Sudden accumu- lations are almost always tainted; most often 1 14 COMMENCEMENT DAYS .f*' there is blood upon them; they can give no real peace or satisfaction. "An inheritance may be gotten hastily at the beginning," says the wise man, "but the end thereof shall not be blessed." The short cut to fortune goes by the way of getting much for a little or something for nothing. The multitude counts that a brilliant achieve- ment. The fashion ofXthe world is to get every- thing, if possible, for \ess than cost. That is what the world calls a ^ood bargain. Money, goods, services, powers, — -^ost of us are figuring to get them without rendering a full equivalent for them. Some of you haVe been elated, now and then, when you , have got^a good mark for a recitation or an examination on which you knew that you were p.6orly prepared. Does It pay.^* Large academlg' credits for small amounts of scholarship — a,^e they worth much.'^ Whom have you cheated, besides yourselves.^ It Is all quite futile. The sense of the Eternal Reality will return to us now and then, in spite of ourselves. No matter how successfully we may have fooled our neighbors, the Eternal Righteousness is never fooled and we know it. And the man who has gotten for himself great wealth by his unscrupulous combinations, by his skill and shrewdness in taking advantage of SHORT CUTS /.. \ the weaknesses or the necessities of his feflow men, and whom the world Is acclaiming Jls a great financier, will have hours when he :^I11 think of the heart-ache and misery, of the desolated homes and broken hearthstones on which his fortunes have been reared, and a foretaste will come to him of the full cup of remorse which he must drain to' its dregs before the penalty of his heart- less greed Is fully paid. And the preacher, the orator, the popular leader who has made himself the Idol of the populacfe by flattering them and silencing his own Gpiivictlons — who has raised the rafters more th^ once by the utterance of sentiments which Me knew to be untrue — must have hours when he knows himself to be the charlatan that ^c is, and when the plaudits of the crowd appear to him but a poor recompense for the loss of a good conscience and the sacrifice of his self-respect. We who have sought to hood- wink the eternal Realities must stand face to face with them, forever. We may, for a time, impose on our fellow men; but the worst of It is that we shall have to live with ourselves for a great while, and some of us, I fear, will find our- selves poor company. There is one other application of this principle « to which we may give a few moments. This | refers to our efforts to improve society. The ^ 1 16 COMMENCEMENT DAYS attempt to secure by methods of force, or by legal contrivances, social conditions which can only be reached by the slow processes of growth, is a mistake which many persons in this genera- tion are continually making. To suppose that the social life of the nation can be regenerated, off hand, either by revolutionary insurrections, or by revolutionary legislation, is a prevalent error. The Millennium will never be brought in by any such magical instantaneous change. The social reformer, with his one panacea for all social ills, imagines that if he could get the people to adopt his measure, poverty and wretchedness, vice and crime would at once be banished from the land. He thinks that if the Legislature would i only give him the legal permission, he could mount to the top of the State House dome, and wave his wand, and instantly the want, the care, the sin of the land would fly away; that old shapes of foul disease would disappear, the narrowing lust of gold, the thousand wars of old would vanish out of sight, and the thousand years of peace would begin. No matter what the panacea may be: it may be an eight-hour day, it may be the Single Tax, it may be constitutional prohibition, it may be collectivism, — the visionary reformer imagines that the statutory proclama- tion of it would put an end to poverty and sorrow. SHORTCUTS 117 I do not say that all those who are In favor of such measures entertain such expectations; many of them are much more sober; but you very often hear remarks which Indicate to you how fan- tastic are the hopes entertained by their pro- moters. "I cannot help feeling," said a fairly intelligent and sensible man In my hearing the other day, *'that If all men had free access to natural opportunities, poverty would shortly dis- appear." It was an honest opinion, and yet how baseless! Have we not all seen scores and hun- dreds, with the freest access to natural oppor- tunities — and all other opportunities, — with the very best advantages of all sorts, — with the most helpful and stimulating environment, — despising all their opportunities, refusing the chances offered them, resisting the good influences that surround them, squandering their powers of body and mind, and sinking Into poverty and degrada- tion? Poverty, and wretchedness, vice and crime, are not going to be disposed of In a hurry. They will be with us for a long while yet. Would to God we could get rid of them by some fortunate adjustment of laws, and economic methods! But that Is not possible, and we may as well face the fact. There Is no short cut from this era of want and care and sla to the Promised Land of Universal Peace and Plenty. \^ 1 1 8 COMMENCEMENT DAYS Some of us, most of us, I suppose, have great faith in law. We fondly imagine that if we can persuade Congress or the Legislature to say; "Be it enacted," so and so, the thing thus speci- fied and required would surely come to pass. ".BuX- the-iaw'm^de-notWftg^-peffeety''' P and the saying holds for these. day^ntTTt ess surely ^an for Paul's. Law never made anything per- fect. Law is of use only when it registers and confirms certain steps of moral progress that have already been taken. Law can never lead but must always follow moral reform and social reconstruction. Many, also, are fain to believe that what law cannot do can be done by the sword. Ever since Alexander cut the Gordian Knot, rash reformers have been assuming that the tough problems of the state could be worked out by the last argu- ment of kings. But the expectation is vain. War settles nothing, except some of the most superficial political questions. No social change of any magnitude was ever wrought by violence. In tha book from which I have quoted already, *' Metaerott, Shoemaker," two of the chief charac- ters catrry on this: colloquy: "Aslto slaveryj do you call the negro question a settjed one?" "Well, they are legally their own masters, but SHORT CUTS whether they are better off In essentia] open question." *'Some day, Dr. Richard s^^yfake up some thoughtful history whIcly.^=fou already know- pretty thoroughl5\^ an^^^^ad It with this question In your mind, 'Is^>^y question ever so decided by the sword ^^^to lea'^^ everybody better off all round .^' i^n't there always a residuum of evil to somebody, — and usually to everybody — caused ^by the very means used to effect a cure.'"' If that question were carefully pondered by all classes, I fancy that we should be threatened with no more attempts to solve the social ques- tion by violence. No, my friends, It Is not mainly by legislation, It Is not by revolution, that we shall bring In the glory of the latter day. These short cuts to the promised land will never conduct us thither. They are misleading and delusive. He that hasteth with his feet. In these paths, misseth the way. I do not deny that something may be done by law to Improve the condition of the laboring classes, nor do I deny that compact organization and the firm assertion of rights are necessary, on their part. All I assert Is that It Is not by the methods of destruction and violence, but by discussion, agitation, peaceable combination, and 120 COMMENCEMENT DAYS political action that the ends they seek will be most surely and most speedily reached; and that it is far better to go slowly, one step at a time, and not a very long step either, than to seek to overturn the existing social order and bring in the new dispensation in a day or a generation. *We cannot force the season by legislative enact- ments or by revolutionary outbreaks; any more than we can compel the coming of the Spring by putting on our summer clothes in February.* These great social changes must needs be gradual. They are always the fruit of moral changes in the lives of the people — of better ideas, purified sentiments, elevated aims, regenerated characters. ' Unless they have their basis on this firm ground they do not long endure.* Laziness, selfishness, animalism, will always make trouble, a great deal of trouble, in the best regulated social order. The shirk, the trickster, the thief, the tyrant, the man of beastly appetite would be with us still, if we could get our improved social schemes all happily launched; nor, will the number of them be perceptibly lessened by any new arrange- ment of the social machinery. We shall find them a serious obstruction and a heavy burden, beyond a doubt. Let us suppose that Mr. Bel- lamy's Utopia were inaugurated by universal consent; do you suppose that it would start SHORT CUTS 121 right off in the smooth, frictlonless manner that he describes? No: there would be an army of shirks who would push for the soft places, — and a horde of small politicians who would resort to bribery and every sort of venal Influence; and the strong would still contrive to crowd the weak to the wall; and the mighty host of criminals and vagabonds and paupers would still, for the most part, persist in their parasitic purpose, and would invent schemes of one sort or another by which they would manage to live upon the in- dustry of their fellow men. Let us not suppose that by changing the forms of our social admin- istration, we are going to change, radically and suddenly, the facts of human nature. Yet the truth Is undeniable that "the old order changeth, giving place to new." Clear and bright upon the page of history stand the record and the promise of the progress of the people. We know that the movement by which shackles are unbound, and burdens are lightened and the way of life is made smoother for weary feet Is steadily going forward, that no man can hinder It. Such, then. Is the substance of the word I desire to leave with you. Beware of the short cuts which mean the scamping of work and the forcing of the vital processes. Don't try to get something for nothing or much for little. What concerns you 122 COMMENCEMENT DAYS fmost is that every man who deals with you shall feel and know that he has got a full and fair rec- I ompense for all he has given. I The world owes no man a living; all it owes ^^^-^ - him is a fair chance to get a living. It will give you all that chance, I hope, and it will give you a great deal more. Every day it will give you daily bread, cloud and sunshine, water from the brook, flowers or snow-crystals, helpers for your tasks in willing winds, and falling waters, and electric currents, and kindling flames; tasks for your hands that will discipline your wills; friends to love; needs to serve; beauty to enjoy; a heaven above you to kindle your wonder; paths for your thoughts out into the eternities. Freely, freely you are receiving the bounty of this wonderful world; and you cannot afi"ord in dealing with this world, to get something for nothing, or much for a little. To the world that gives you life you owe love and service. Don't die in debt. Freely ye have received; freely give. VI STUDY AND GROWTH VI STUDY AND GROWTH A GREAT man was once counselling a younger friend concerning the work he had in hand, and among other things he advised him to live a studious life. This young man was out in the world; his period of pupilage was past; but his counsellor seems to urge that his study must go on, that his growth depends on it. To those who are still in school, or who are passing from school to college, it would seem hardly necessary to urge this consideration. It may be, however, that there are those who need to be reminded that as gardening is the main business of a gardener, and banking of a banker, and mining of a miner, so study is the principal and normal business of a student. All this would be commonplace. But it may be worth while to fix our thoughts for an hour on the relations between study and growth, intellectual and moral growth, growth of character. Physical growth, for the most part, takes care of itself. The healthy human body increases in 125 126 COMMENCEMENT DAYS stature and In vigor by processes that are largely organic or instinctive. It is true that intelligence, directed toward the better understanding of the laws of nutrition and of physical culture and of hygiene, may facilitate and stimulate growth — may enable us to secure symmetry and perfec- tion of physical development. To a certain extent the laws of physical growth are under our control. But savages, who give no attention to such matters, often attain to great physical power and perfection. Following Instinct and appetite their bodies reach maturity and vigor. But the growth of the mind does not proceed upon these lines. Natural Impulse and instinct cannot be depended on to secure its perfection. The savage is evidence of this: for while, under the operation of simply natural forces, he often becomes a splendid animal, he always remains a child in Intellect. The growth of the mind calls therefore, for the right direction and the proper exercise of the intellectual powers. It is not a matter which can be left to the operation of automatic forces; it is a matter which depends upon the attention, the choice, the conscious and deliberate coopera- tion of the mind Itself. I have used the word cooperation; what does that signify.? With whom and with what are STUDY AND GROWTH 127 you to cooperate In promoting the growth of your own intellectual and moral powers? The first and most obvious answer would seem to be that you are to cooperate with those who are seeking to secure for you this good thing — who have set before themselves your highest welfare as the object of their choice and are doing what they can to promote it. Many of you have parents whose concern for you is deep and gen- uine, whose happiness is bound up with your welfare in ways far more intimate than you are able to conceive, and who have no other interest in life so dear as that which is involved in the development of your minds and hearts. They desire to see you becoming men and women in the full sense of those great words, and they have furnished you with such educational advantages as you are now enjoying, perhaps at some sacri- fice, because they cherish for you this desire. The teachers whose instruction you are enjoying are the agents who have been chosen by them to do this work for you. It is fair to assume that the teachers themselves, although they have less personal interest in you, have some clear sense of the value to you of the good which your parents have chosen for you, and are desirous of helping you to realize it. What 1 am now suggesting is the wisdom of 1 28 COMMENCEMENT DA YS cooperating heartily with those who are seeking the highest development of your manhood and womanhood. You can have no doubt, I suppose, that, if this is the end they have in view, they have chosen the best conceivable thing for you. To realize yourselves; to become what God meant you to be, to "make your calling and election sure," — this is the highest thing you can think of. So far as the end to be aimed at is concerned there can be no difference of opinion between yourself and those who have been choosing for you. But you may be inclined to believe that their way of working to secure this end is not the best, and therefore you may sometimes find yourself out of harmony with some of the plans for you — questioning the wisdom of parents and teachers, doubting the value of this or that kind of training, perhaps disposed to rebel against pupilage alto- gether and to feel that you ought to be permitted to choose your own way, with little or no sugges- tion from anybody. It is just at this point that I want to ask you to think soberly. Is it not, probably, on the whole, the best thing you can do to cooperate heartily with those who are seeking your welfare.'* Is it not likely that the regimen which they choose for you will be more v/isely STUDY AND GROWTH 1 29 chosen than that which you might choose for yourself? They have the experience of many generations to guide them; is it not a little safer for you to follow the path indicated by experience than to strike out a new road for yourself? It is, of course, true that neither parents nor teachers are infallible, that our systems of educa- tion may be in many ways defective; and it is therefore possible that there may be something better for you than what they have chosen for you. But on the other hand it is perhaps safe for you to admit that you are not infallible; and that the systems and methods which you deem defective may be better than any which you could devise. It is not at all improbable that what you think their defects are their greatest excel- lencies and that the things which you wish to avoid are the things you most need. There are two facts which it is well for you to bear in mind in this connection. The first is that it is natural for young people, say from fourteen or fifteen to twenty-one or twenty-two, to put a great deal of emphasis on their individual likes and dislikes, — their own ideas, and notions, and idiosyncracies, and preferences — and to feel that their way, because it is their way, is and must be a great deal better than anybody else's way. It is the time of life when the human being comes I30 COMMENCEMENT DAYS to a knowledge of himself, and when the sense of selfhood is much exaggerated. He is apt to think that his feelings, ideas, aptitudes are peculiar to himself, that no one can quite understand or appreciate him. "A common tendency," says a leading psy- chologist, "observable — especially in younger per- sons who are still in the adolescent stage. . . is the sense of estrangement. It is a very frequent experience for persons to feel themselves shut off from others; to think their individual revelations peculiar to themselves: to look upon customs and conventions as external to their own experi- ences. . . . One young man writes: *I have a striking and peculiar experience, and one you don't see often'; but an outsider, on reading his record in connection with many others, is able to find in it nothing that is striking or unusual. When twenty-two years of age Kingsley wrote to his mother: I am not like common men; I am neither cleverer nor wiser nor better than the multitude, but utterly different from them in heart and mind.' A girl writes, 'I am different from other people; I have never been a blind follower in thought or deed.' " You very often hear this feeling expressed by boys and girls in their teens. "Now / am made just like ^Au," — you hear them saying; or "It's i ^TUDY AND GROWTH I3 1 just this way with w^," — their notion evidently being that there is something very unusual about the way in which they are made; when the particulars which they proceed to state about themselves show that there Is nothing at all ex- ceptional about their mental and moral structure: they are, to all human appearance, very much like other folks. Now do not for one moment Imagine that I am ridiculing this state of mind; It is perfectly natural for you to think and feel so. "There is," says Mr. Dole, "nothing wrong or alarming In this self-conscious adolescent stage. . . . The youth is learning values, and his own values are the first which he learns. Meantime other values appear out of perspective." When you first begin to get possession of yourselves, you have your hands pretty full of yourselves — and your head and your heart too. That is neither mar- vellous nor censurable, but it results in one of the illusions of adolescence. And it Is this feeling — that you are a peculiar person, — quite unlike others — which makes you sometimes restive under discipline; unwilling to accept the regimen pro- vided for you; inclined to fly the track and strike out a path for yourselves. It is this feeling which makes It sometimes difficult for you to cooperate with parents and teachers In their plans for your 132 COMMENCEMENT DAYS training and development. "All that may be well enough for other people,'* you are sometimes inclined to say, "but I am not like other people." And the fact which I now wish to impress upon you is that this is the natural illusion of adoles- cence; that you are, after all, very much like other people; and that the training which is good for other people is probably just what you need. I ask you to summon your own common sense and take a rational view of this matter; to recog- nize the fact that your instinctive feelings in these transitional years are not always safe guides. The other fact which I should like to have you bear in mind is one which you will have to take my word for. It is my own observation of the results of refusing to cooperate with parents and teachers and stick to the regular courses of school and college. One learns a good deal in living fifty or sixty years among young people and v/atching their careers. I have seen a good many young men and women fly the track in this way — get it into their heads that the methods of steady work and thorough discipline might be good enough for other people but were not need- ful for them, — and I have had a chance to talk the matter over with quite a number of them ten or twenty or forty years afterward. And if you could hear their retrospective testimony d STUDY AND GROWTH 133 respecting their own fatal foolishness; if you could hear the hard names which they are wont to call themselves when they think of the mis- take they made in refusing the opportunities of education that were offered them, you would think several times before repeating their mistake. One is apt to find out, after he is fully launched into the business of life, how much a good educa- tion is worth; but the things which we might have had neither bring pence to our purses nor peace to our hearts. It does not comfort you much in harvest time to know that in seed time you were a fool. It will do you no great good, when the century is forty years old to look back to its sec- ond decade and reflect that your head was then so distended with your own conceit that there was no room in it for common sense. But the cooperation of which I spoke some time ago, goes deeper still. It is not alone with parents and teachers that you need to cooperate but with agencies deeper and diviner, — with forces that are at work within your own souls. For this period of adolescence through which a good many of you are passing — a period which lasts from twelve or fourteen till twenty- two or twenty- four — is a period in which a good many things, some of them very significant, are taking place in your lives. A great fermentation and up- 134 COMMENCEMENT DAYS heaval is going on then: it is quite apt to be a period of storm and stress; and the experience of which Paul writes in the seventh chapter of the Romans is the experience through which you often feel that you are passing, — the law in the members is warring against the law of the mind; and you can say with Paul: "That which I do I know not; for not what I would that do I practice, but what I hate that I do. . . . To will is present with me, but to do that which is good is not." This conflict within the soul assumes many phases. The psychologist from whom I have already quoted, says that many of the phenomena of adolescence "center in the disparity which exists between . . . the old self and its new possi- bilities. Youth is the time of the awakening of ideals, a time when there is an intimation of a larger life ahead, a fuller life still on the out- side. . . . The direct result of this lack of har- mony between the two selves is that the power of insight and appreciation grows in advance of the power of activity. One sees what to do but lacks the ability to execute it. . . . The first factor in it all is the increased complexity of life which comes through the germination of new powers and the capacity for new functions. . . . The next factor to be emphasized is the seeing but STUDY AND GROWTH 135 not doing — feeling but not responding by some adequate activity; having an impulse in a certain direction but seeing it deadened by a lack of vital energy or through the paralysis of the will under opposing motives. . . . Dim, indefinable, irrepressible impulses press in on one. They are too large and hazy to find definite outlet. The person is comparatively helpless in the breach between theory and practice; between insight and the ability to act; between appreciation and the power of execution." Such are some of the phenomena of that period of mental and spiritual growth through which the students of high school and college are pass- ing. They are the signs of enlarging life. They are the growing pains of the soul. They show that the life is moving out into larger relations and broader sympathies. And this period of growth is a critical period. It is a time when the nobler faculties are roused; when there are great aspirations and high ideals; it is also a time when the passions rage and the animal strives for the mastery. "Youth," says the writer from whom I am quoting, *' is the point of development at which . . . not only geniuses begin to develop but also criminals; not only per- sons of greatest spiritual insight, but likewise those of the extremest sensuality. It is at this 136 COMMENCEMENT DAYS point that religious difficulties most frequently develop into insanity. It is the point at which possibilities open up in every direction. If too much let alone, the crystallization which shall set the pattern for the whole after life may be some excess or fatality quite abnormal. The little tottering child learns by experience, but may be destroyed in the process of learning. It is of the gravest importance to look toward the means of steering clear of the developmental tendencies when they are liable to become too extreme." Now I do not believe that there is any better medicine for this kind of disorder than the faith- ful performance of some daily task by which the intellectual powers are disciplined, the judgment trained, and the habits of attention formed. Some muscular exercise is good, but mental dis- cipline is most essential — some such exercise of the intellectual powers as shall enable us to guide them whithersoever we will, and to hold them to their tasks; the training which shall give us the mastery of ourselves. What we want is intellectual clarity and steadiness; the power to bring our chaotic mental world into unity: and there is no better way to gain this than to take up some regular course of study and hold our- selves to it till it is finished. And although this may seem in its earlier STUDY AND GROWTH 137 stages laborious and severe, yet there is apt to come to those who are patient and resolute and persevering a deliverance from the bondage of routine and painful effort into the liberty of spontaneous action. In learning new things there are often long periods when we seem to ourselves to be making no progress; but if we persevere, suddenly, some day, almost before we know it, we are over the difficulty and find our- selves doing easily and naturally what has long been done clumsily and painfully. I have learned to row, with a free oar, within a few years; and that experience is fresh in my memory. For a considerable time I labored with the oars — to get them into the water simultane- ously; not to dip too deeply; to turn the blade at the right angle so that it could easily be lifted out of the water; to hold it at the right angle so that it would feather beautifully, skimming the surface of the water on the backward stroke; to turn it in the nick of time for the perpendicular dip — all this I found it hard to do, and there were constant hitches and splashes; it seemed as if I would never get the hang of the oars. But old oarsmen told me to keep right at it, and before I knew it I should find that my wrists had unconsciously acquired the right twist, so that the action would be automatic. So it happened; 1 3 8 COMMENCEMEN T DA YS the time came when the muscles began to do their work without watching, the process required no more attention than breathing. One investigator who has been studying the psychology of telegraphing, found that those who were learning to receive messages by ear generally started in promisingly, and made con- siderable progress for a few weeks, but "just before the proficiency required for receiving main line messages was reached there is, without exception, a plateau in the curve of improvement extending through several weeks, — a long period *when the student can feel no improvement and when objective tests show little or none.' Then follows a sudden rise in the curve. 'Suddenly within a few days, the change comes and the senseless clatter becomes intelligible speech.'" ^f Something like this is in store for a good many \\^ of you, if you will hold yourselves steadily to ■"^^ tasks in which you often seem to yourselves to be making no progress. " Sudden the worst turns the best to the brave." The difficulties of any subject which you are studying are apt to clear up all at once if you hold yourself to it without wavering or flinching. And so it is with the whole great problem of life, which often looms before you vast, portentous, insoluble. Just as you get the mastery of the STUDY AND GROWTH 139 lesser tasks, and find them turning to pleasures, so you may hope to get the conscious mastery of life as a whole, and the light and joy which come with that assurance. There will never be a day without conflict and toil and struggle; but there may come to you a day when there will be peace in the heart and the knowledge that the world is under your feet; that you are conquerors and more than conquerors. But all this depends on a firm and unwavering fidelity every day to the duty in hand. Such mastery and glory do not come to those who scuttle and run when days are dark or tasks are dull; they are the portion only of those who have patience to stand fast and endure and overcome. Only for such is the crown of life waiting. The growth of the human soul is a marvellous thing: one who has lived long enough to watch the process in many lives has found in it a peren- nial source of interest and wonder. The gradual unfolding of the intellectual faculties, the gradual clearing up of the ideals, the steady maturing of power and purpose — how inspiring it is! Nor is it a rare phenomenon. How many have I known In a pastorate of fifty-five years, who have come up from childish Immaturity to vigorous manhood and splendid womanhood — passing through the storm and stress of adolescence, 140 COMMENCEMENT DAYS holding fast their standards, keeping faith with- their better selves, and finally coming out into the open with God's clear sky over their heads and the world and the flesh and the devil under their feet. Some of them are here before me; some of them are in other cities, in other lands; it is good to think of them and to feel sure that wherever they are they are standing firm in their integrity and doing well their work. We often recount the failures we have known; perhaps we are wont to dwell too much upon these: it is well now and then to call the roll of those who have fought the good fight and won it: who have out- grown their crudities and chastened their conceit, and brought to heel their passions and learned to rule their spirits with reason and good will. A great cloud of such witnesses there is, in the skies above and in the earth beneath, who are waiting to-night to testify that for you, too, if you will choose it and lay hold upon it, there is the right and the power to receive the fullness of life and to enter into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. VII BOOKS AND READING VII BOOKS AND READING OF Books and Reading what could one hope to say In half an hour? Nothing adequate: It Is picking up a few pebbles on the shore of a measureless ocean. Yet one may pick up pebbles to some purpose; Demos- thenes did, we are told, and Sir Isaac Newton must have thought of doing It, else we should not have had the simile, Itself as well-worn as the pebbles. One who loves books and who loves young folks likes to bring the two together. Perhaps books have been to some of you mainly taskmasters, of late: I want you to make them friends. You can have no better company in the days now before you. Of books and reading, I am set to speak and chiefly of the reading of books. There Is a great deal of reading which has nothing to do with books. The Americans are said to be a reading people, but booksellers all over the land are testi- fying that the number of books sold Is much less, in proportion to the population, than It was twenty-five or fifty years ago. I have been told 143 144 COMMENCEMENT DAYS that more books were sold In Columbus, when it was a city of thirty or forty thousand than are sold to-day when it boasts of two hundred thou- sand. One reason for this is the growth of li- braries; another and more important reason is the multiplication of newspapers and magazines. If we could represent graphically, after the fashion of the time, the newspaper reader as compared with the book-reader — or at any rate, the time given to newspaper reading by all readers as compared with the time given to book reading by all readers, — we should have, I dare say, a co- lossus not less than six fathoms high for our news- paper reader, and a pigmy whose stature was not more than a handbreadth for our book-reader. I am not inveighing against newspaper read- ing; it is part of the business of life; no man can be a good citizen who wholly neglects it. For certain needful information we have nowhere else to go. If nothing beyond this needful in- formation were there, the newspaper might afford intellectual and moral profit; as it is, one does not expect to win culture or character by exercising his faculties in this field. We must make no sweeping statements about newspapers; we must recognize the fact that they are not all alike, and that some of them are conducted on a much higher plane than others; but the effect BOOKS AND READING 145 of newspaper reading as a whole upon the in- tellect, the taste, the imagination of the people is far from salutary. "It is not," says one essay- ist, "the function of the newspapers to minister to the intellect or the imagination in any high sense." This must, I suppose, be confessed. For the training of the mind, for the cultivation of the judgment, for the purification of the ideals, we must find some other kind of reading than that which the average newspaper furnishes. In truth, the effect upon the intellect of the news- paper habit is to disable it for the reading of good literature. It is just because we Americans read newspapers so much that we are losing our power to enjoy good books. The man who likes the stunning head-line and the shrieky rhetoric, and the sensational exposure of all life's vulgarities, cannot possibly find any pleasure in what is properly known as literature. Those who feed voraciously six days in the week upon diet of this kind and give the greater part of Sunday to a pile of this provender which is not only in quantity more formidable but in quality more debased than that of the week-days, will never buy good books and read them. It is not only time that is wasted in stuffing the mind with the details of crime and the trivialities of gossip and the spun out inanities of what is called 146 COMMENCEMENT DAYS news, but the powers of the mind itself are en- feebled by such a mental habit. The first word of counsel for young readers is, then, that they learn to read the newspaper rapidly, and cursorily. You must read it, you cannot neglect it, but you can get through with it speedily. A little practice will enable you to tell at a glance whether the page has anything worth spending your time upon. A good way to read the articles with the staring head-lines is to begin near the bottom, for it is often the case that what is brazenly asserted in the caption is denied in the last paragraph. Fifteen or twenty minutes will generally put a swift reader in pos- session of all that is of real importance to him in a newspaper. Sometimes he will light upon something to which he will give more time, but not often. And those who resolutely practice such a method as this may save a great deal of time for the reading of good books. The magazines are no doubt answerable for a large amount of the diminution in the sale of books: and the magazines are, as a class, of a much higher rank than the newspapers. Yet the magazine is a business enterprise: it must sell — that is the first consideration; and naturally it strikes at timely topics, and seeks to swim with the current of the popular thought. It possesses, BOOKS AND READING I47 therefore, a strong flavor of contemporaneity: it does not cultivate in us the habit of taking wide and calm views of life. Mr. Arlo Bates pro- nounces this judgment: *'The genuinely cultivated reader finds in the monthlies many papers which he looks through as he looks through the newspaper, for the sake of information, and less often he comes upon imaginative work. The serials which are worth reading at all are worthy of being read as a whole, and not in the distorted and distorting fashion of so many words a month, according to the size of the page of a particular periodical. Reading a serial is like plucking a rose petal by petal, the whole of the flower may be gathered but its condition is little likely to be satisfactory. While the magazines, moreover, are not to be looked to for a great deal of literature of lasting value, they not only encourage the habit of reading in- dlff"erent imitations, but they foster a dangerous and demoralizing inability to fasten the attention for any length of time. The magazine mind is a thing of shreds and patches at best: incapable of grasping as a whole any extended work. Liter- ature holds the mirror up to nature, but the magazine is apt to show the world through a toy multiplying glass which gives to the mind a hundred minute and distorted images." 148 COMMENCEMENT DAYS This judgment needs to be qualified, for some of the best literature is constantly appearing in the magazines; nevertheless it is true that much of it is fragmentary and ephemeral: and that the mind which gets all its supplies from periodical literature will not be a very well-equipped mind. I am pleading, then, for books: I desire to get your assent to my contention that books are far better worth knowing than magazines or newspapers. That there are multitudes of worth- less and mischievous books I am not denying; you will be called to exercise a most careful discrimination when you deal with them; but I am calling your attention to the fact that the great literature of the world is not, chiefly, that which is appearing daily, weekly, and monthly in current periodical literature, but must be largely that which has been produced in past years or centuries; and this is preserved for us only in books. To shut ourselves up to the prod- uct of the day Is to doom ourselves to a hopeless provinciality and narrowness of thought. How much of this one encounters, in his daily contact with men! How many there are who have ab- solutely no outlook upon life, who are utterly cabinned, cribbed, confined within the influences of the present, to whom the generations of the past, with their stores of experience, are as though BOOKS AND READING I49 they had never been! How often one hears judgments expressed, with all the arrogance of ignorance, which a little more familiarity with what men have been thinking and saying in the past would have greatly modified. Yet even of the literature of the present, we may safely say that that which succeeds in getting itself within covers is apt to be a little better considered, and a little more worthy of serious attention than that which is to be used to kindle your fire with before it is twenty-four hours old. Many of the books of the present are ephemeral, no doubt; but some that are well worth knowing are ap- pearing in every decade; it is our misfortune if we fail to get acquainted with them. Between new books and old we must hold the scales evenly: the man who never reads a new book is as far from wisdom as the man who never reads an old one. There is this to say, however, that there is some presumption in favor of a book which has lived for a generation or a century or a millennium. I am not at all sure that nat- ural selection in this case works unerringly, that it is always the fittest which survive; yet it is, no doubt, the general rule, and that is one reason why one turns with a little more confi- dence to what are known as the classics of our literature. That word is often misused; it is I50 COMMENCEMENT DAYS sometimes applied to books which are yet damp from the press. Perhaps a definition may be serviceable, and this is Arlo Bates's: "A classic is more than a book which has been preserved. It must have been approved. It is a work which has received the suffrages of genera- tions. Out of the innumerable books, of the making of which there was no end even so long ago as the time of Solomon, some few have been by the general voice of the world chosen as worthy of preservation. There are certain writings which, amid all the multitudinous distractions of prac- tical life, amid all the changes of custom, belief and taste, have continuously pleased and moved mankind, and to these we give the name Classics." Not all of these, however strict may be our limitation, can any of us hope to know; but we may know some of the best of them. The writer whom I have just quoted names five of the greater classics, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, Homer, and the Bible. With each of these every fairly intelligent person ought to be tolerably familiar. Homer and Dante must be read by most of us as we read the Bible, in translations; but there are good translations; for a few dimes you may possess yourself of either of these classics. To enjoy Chaucer you would need to do a little study in some handbook of Early English, but BOOKS AND READING 151 that study would well repay your labor. Shake- speare, with excellent explanatory notes Is easily accessible, and he, beyond all the rest thus far named is the poet of humanity. Matthew Arnold's noble sonnet does not over-estimate his greatness: Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask, — thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty, Planting his stedfast footsteps in the sea, Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling place, Spares but the cloudy border of his base To the foil'd searching of mortality; And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honor'd, self-secure, Didst tread on earth unguess'd at. — Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow Find their sole speech in that victorious brow. Of the Bible as literature much has been said of late, but I have found in a book on the study of literature which I have been reading during the past week (and from which I have been quoting), a passage which I will read to you: "If it were asked which of the classics a man absolutely must know to attain to a language of 152 COMMENCEMENT DAYS literature even respectable, the answer undoubt- edly would be, 'The Bible and Shakespeare.' He must be familiar in the sense in which we use the word in the phrase 'mine own familiar friend in whom I trusted' — with the greatest plays of Shakespeare, and with the finer portions of the Scriptures. I do not of course mean all of the Bible. Nobody, no matter how devout, can be expected to find imaginative stimulus in strings of genealogies such as that which begins the Book of Chronicles, or in the minute details of the Jewish ceremonial law. I mean the simple directness of Genesis and Exodus; the straight- forward sincerity of Judges and Joshua; the sweetness and beauty of Ruth and Esther; the passionately idealized sensuousness of Canticles; the shrewdly pathetic wisdom of Ecclesiastes; the splendidly imaginative ecstasies of Isaiah; the uplift of the Psalms; the tender virility of the Gospels; the spiritual dithyrambics of the Apocalypse. No reader less dull than a clod can remain unreverent and unthrilled in the presence of that magnificent poem which one hesitates to say is surpassed by either Homer or Dante, the Book of Job. The student of literature may be of any religion or of no religion, but he must realize, and realize by intimate acquaintance, that, taken as a whole, the Bible is the most BOOKS AND READING 1 53 virile, the most Idiomatic, the most Imaginative prose work in the language." I have found, also, during this week. In one of the magazines for November an article on the Bible as Literature, in which the writer asserts that "the Bible Is the one book that no Intelli- gent person, who wishes to come into sympathetic touch with the world of thought, and to share the Ideas of the great minds of the Christian era, can afford to be Ignorant of." All this may serve to indicate that some sense of the value of this book as the instrument of culture Is beginning to get possession of the public mind. Yet the Ig- norance of this book which prevails even among the young people of our Christian families Is deplorable. It Is high time that parents and Sunday School teachers and all other teachers were bestirring themselves to put an end to con- ditions so shameful. But there are, probably, a good many young people before me who would be compelled, if their knowledge were tested, to confess that they know very little about this book. It Is not necessary that they should be ignorant. You can buy a copy of It for twenty or twenty-five cents, — (though most of you could well afford a better one) — and you can find many opportunities of studying It, under good instructors. 154 COMMENCEMENT DAYS Besides these greater classics are many other English books with which you may hope to be- come familiar. None of us can read any more than a small proportion of the best books; but all of us may extend our acquaintance among them, if we have the will to do so and will make the most of our opportunities. I cannot be very specific in counsels covering so large a field; but one or two bits of suggestion are submitted to your judgment: I. So far as you are able read your own books. The public library is a great convenience, as is the hotel and the restaurant; but as some of us prefer, for the most part, to sleep in our own beds and eat at our own tables, so we greatly prefer to read our own books. Generally speak- ing, a book that is worth reading is worth owning. We must not push this dictum too far; there are many whose hunger for books can only be satis- fied by the library, because they are not able to buy for themselves. Still it is far better, when we can, to have our books about us, as permanent companions. The single reading does not exhaust a valuable book, any more than a single conver- sation exhausts the friendship of a valuable friend. We want to return to it many times; we want to become thoroughly familiar with it. To know a few good books in this way is far better than to BOOKS AND READING 1 55 have a nodding acquaintance with a multitude. Many of the young people who listen to me are saying that they cannot afford to buy books. How many of them afford several dollars a month for dope or cigarettes, and how many of them can afford to go every week or two to the theater.? I am not saying that money spent for all these purposes Is all wasted, but I am sure that those who are able to afford so much money for such things could, if they would, begin even now to lay the foundations of a library. I am sometimes a good deal surprised to find well-to-do people — even those who like to read — buying books very infrequently: they seem to put them into the category of scarcely allowable luxuries. Not so; books are among the necessaries of life to those who know what life means. "When I get a little money," said Hugo Grotius, "I buy books. If I have any left I buy food and clothes." That is hyperbole, but it is an approximation to the truth. 2. Read the great books carefully. Some of the lesser ones you may skim; but the more precious and authoritative ones should not be treated in that way. You must con them, weigh them, consider them. On this Ruskin's counsel in " Sesame and Lilies " is excellent. Read all that he says about it. "You must get yourself into 156 COMMENCEMENT DAYS the habit," he says, "of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable, letter by letter. . . . You might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly * illiterate' uneducated person, but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, that is to say with real accuracy, you are forever- more in some measure an educated person." 3. Choose your books as you choose your com- panions, with a clear view of what they are able to do for that which is best in your nature. Do not read a book, if you can help it, which lowers your standards of virtue or honor, which loosens your grip upon the realities of daily life; which makes you moody or dreamy, or pessimistic. Choose the books which widen your horizon, brace your manhood, confirm your highest pur- poses; and which, if they uncover for you the evils of life, nerve you to resist and overcome them. 4. Within the boundaries of sanity and de- cency cultivate a catholic taste. You ought to be able to appreciate and enjoy more than one kind of books; you ought to be able to see that as there are many men of many minds, so then must be many books of many kinds. Of cours the effect of a wide knowledge of literature is to BOOKS AND READING 157 cultivate this catholicity; the thorough going dogmatist in literature, the man who wants to set up his dictum as decisive, and to anathematize what he disHkes is one who has not, probably, read very widely and who, probably, never will. I remember well a Sophomore in college who, on my first meeting with him, found me reading "Dombey and Son," and who launched forth into a sweeping condemnation of Dickens as a silly, stupid, brainless writer: he couldn't see how anybody could waste his time on him. I answered him not a word but I made up my mind about him, that day, and I never had rea- son to change it. That is a very good story of Thackeray and Carlyle, at a dinner of the Royal Academy, where the talk turned upon Titian. "'One fact about Titian,' a painter said, 'is his glorious coloring.' 'And his glorious drawing is another fact about Titian, ' put in a second. Then one added one thing in praise and another another, until Carlyle interrupted them to say with egotistic emphasis and deliberation: 'And here sit I, a man made in the image of God, who knows nothing about Titian, and who cares nothing about Titian; — and that's another fact about Titian.' But Thackeray, who was sipping his claret and listening, paused and bowed gravely to his fellow guest. ' Pardon me,' he said, ' that IS8 COMMENCEMENT DAYS ^ is not a fact about Titian. It is a fact — and a very lamentable fact— about Thomas Carlyle.'" Let us not attempt to make our ignorance the arbiter of other people's tastes. If you should ask me now to name for you, in three minutes, three of the chief gains to be gotten from good books I should answer, first, in the phrase of Barrett Wendell: "It is only in books that one can travel in time." A book is a swift conveyance that will transport you, in a moment, into the heart of far away centuries, and enable you to live, for a while, in the minds of people long dead; to understand what ideals charmed them and what passions moved them; to compare their life with ours and measure the progress which the race has made. Secondly, the great books help us in getting insight into life — other people's lives and our own lives too; in getting acquainted with ourselves. "Studies of the Soul," is the title of one of the best of my new books. Most of the greatest books are studies of the soul, and they aid us greatly in acquiring the knowledge which Socrates insisted was the most important of all knowledge — the knowledge of ourselves. "Knowledge without self-honesty," says one, "is as a torch without flame; yet of all the moral graces self- honesty is perhaps the most difficult to acqujre. BOOKS AND READING 159 In its acquirement is literature of the highest value. A man can become acquainted with his spiritual face as with his bodily countenance only by its reflection. Literature is the mirror in which the soul learns to recognize its own lineaments." For this purpose fiction of the highest grade is most serviceable. That fiction is to many of those who are listening to me a savor of death unto death I do most sadly fear. I presume that there are some scores of persons in this audience whose only chance of possessing a sound and vigorous mind lies in their absolutely ceasing to read fiction and beginning at once a course of mental training by which they may recover from the debilitation which a steady diet of novels has wrought. All this is truth which needs to be spoken often, and with deep seriousness, in the ears of young Americans. Yet it remains true that for those who have not abused their minds by these enervating excesses, for those who still have enough mental grip and power of attention to read serious books and find pleasure in them, the higher fiction may often be a most useful means of education, in clearing up their insights, in revealing to them the secret springs of conduct, in helping them to understand themselves, and to interpret human life. l6o COMMENCEMENT DAYS And, finally, good books serve us greatly by recreating in us the life of the spirit, the life of the intellect, hy strengthening what Paul calls the law of the mind, in its fight with the law of the members, the grovelling tendencies. All the higher motives and incentives are constantly drugged and dulled by the materialism that surrounds us like a cloud; the atmosphere of the mart and the shop and the street stifles our heroism, our hope, our disinterestedness, and stimulates our greed, our cunning, our animalism. If we would save our souls we must often get out of this mirk and mire to better air and firmer footing. And the great books — best of all the great poetry — lift us up, and set us on a rock and put a new song into our mouths. We see Childe Roland setting his slug-horn to his lips and blowing his defiance to the Dark Tower; we read the mag- nificent faith of "Prospice" and *'Abt Vogler;" we listen to Whittier's glorious "Psalm;" or to Holmes's "Chambered Nautilus" or to Lowell's immortal * Commemoration Ode," and our hearts are stronger for the struggle of life. We begin to see that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. We know that things which eye sees not and ear hears not are the true necessaries of life. BOOKS AND READING l6l In good books the great souls of all the ages have left for you their legacy of faith and inspira- tion. Do not miss your inheritance. Choose wisely among them. The best are as accessible as the worst. If you keep bad company among books it is because you prefer it; the noblest offer themselves to you quite as cordially as the meanest. Finally, brethren, whatsoever books are true, whatsoever books are honorable, whatsoever books are pure, whatsoever books are lovely, whatsoever books are of good report, if there be among books any virtue and any that are worthy of praise, read these books. VIII WHAT FOR? VIII WHAT FOR? WHAT am I living for? Let us come to close quarters with this question of questions. Let us face it, like men and women, without flinching. If we have no coherent purpose in life, if we are only drifting, let us know that. If we are waver- ing between diverse and irreconcilable aims, let us know that. If we have ideals, objects, ends of any sort in view let us know what they are. The question of the final cause — the *'what for?" — is deeply human. Children with wakeful minds are always asking it, sometimes to our embarrassment. "Grandfather, what is that calf standing there for?" was a question put to me as we drove past a pasture. It went beyond my depth. The persistent inquiry is the witness to the teleological tendency of the human mind, — the instinctive disposition to assume that a pur- pose underlies all life; that everything is for some- thing. We are all living: How many of us know what we are living for? We begin life in a sublime unconsciousness of separate existence. The little i6s l66 COMMENCEMENT DAYS child does not make the metaphysical distinction between the *' me " and the " not me; " for a good while after he begins to talk he speaks of himself in the third person; "The baby new to earth and sky, What time his tender palm is pressed Against the arches of the breast, Has never thought that 'this is I;' "But as he grows he gathers much, And learns the use of *I,' and *me,* And finds, *I am not what I see And other than the things I touch;' "So rounds he to a separate mind. From whence clear memory may begin, As through the frame that binds him in, His isolation grows defined." "The state of babyhood," says Mr. Dole, "is the state of the young animal. There is a suc- cession of sensations, pains, pleasures, passions, desires, like so many colored beads strung to- gether on a thread. The only unity at first is that made by the string of memory upon which the beads are threaded; but this is not real or constructive unity. There is no freedom in the young child, who is moved from within and with- out by a variety of compelling causes, visible and invisible. He uses will, but it is like a blind force. It is not free will." WHAT FOR? . 167 But by and by the sense of his separateness dawns, and becomes the dominant fact of his experience. During the earlier period of adoles- cence the youth is quite sufficiently conscious of himself. This seems to be a necessary stage in human development. The individual has his rights and dignities and it is needful that these should be understood. So long as this mood of mind prevails the ques- tion we are considering to-night is not likely to be usefully considered. The tendency of the human being at this period is not to ask what he is made for, but rather to assume that all the world is made for him. This is, or ought to be, however, a rudimentary stage in the development of the human being. I fear that a great many persons — perhaps the great majority — never outgrow it. Most of us remain more or less under the dominion of the egotistic illusions, and keep assuming that the world revolves around us. If this is the state of mind, the study of the problem of life will not be profitable. But one hopes to come across, here and there, ingenuous young men and women who are, in part at least, free from these egotistic illusions: who are beginning to be aware that no man liveth unto himself; that the completion and perfection of life are found in its relations. I l68 COMMENCEMENT DAYS know that there are young men and women who are capable of comprehending the seriousness of life, its great opportunities, its heavy responsi- bilities, for I have met some of them, and have heard from their own lips the confession of their earnest wish to find the goal of life. The question before us is not the question of occupation or calling; that Is simply a means to an end: what we are thinking of now is the end. What is the controlling conception of the good of life, which marshalls our energies and directs our endeavors .? Let us hear the answers which some of you are making to this question of questions. Your day dreams, your night visions — the pictures that you make for yourself of life's consummation and crown — let us throw them upon the screen and contemplate them. You hope — some of you — to possess a vigorous and healthy body, a well-developed physique, a comely and attractive personality. Some of you put a good deal of stress on this: To be a great athlete would fill this ambition of some young men that I have known; to be a great beauty would satisfy the deepest desires of some young < women. But these can hardly be con- sidered as objects of life. Get vigor, young men, and with all your gettings get muscular efficiency, WHAT FOR ? 169 but what are you going to do with It after you have got it? The body at Its best Is but the In- strument of the soul; the soul Is the man. An athlete with whom athleticism has become the end of existence Is a kind of Incarnate non seq- uitur. Beauty, also, in a woman is a good gift of God, — but it performs its true ministry only when it Is an unconscious possession. When it is coveted and counted on, when It Is regarded as a personal asset, and paraded as a personal distinction It becomes unsightly and profane. The career of a "professional" beauty is one of degradation. It is clear that life cannot find Its end In bodily perfection of any sort. But some of you are hoping to possess well- stored and well-disciplined minds. You have a passion for culture. As many as possible of the things worth knowing you want to know; with the best that is In books you desire to be familiar; you have some conception of the power that knowledge gives and you desire to wield it; you crave the mastery of languages, so that the literature of many tongues may offer you its treasures. There is wealth of the highest sort here which you covet, and you are ready to give time and toil to gain It. Or it may be that science has touched you 170 COMMENCEMENT DAYS with its fascinating spell; you have followed the patient students who have been interrogating nature and compelling her to yield up her secrets, and you have caught their enthusiasm and desire to add to the store of scientific knowledge which they are gathering. All this is high employment, stimulating and inspiring occupation for the mind: but is this the end of life? Do we live to know? Is not knowledge, as well as physical strength, an in- strument rather than an end ? What are you going to do with your knowledge, when you have got it? Some among you will be quite ready to reply to this challenge. You are not in any danger of valuing knowledge as an end in itself: of its in- strumental character you are fully persuaded — too fully persuaded, it may be. You have never thought of making it the final cause of existence; you have sought it only as a means to an end — perhaps to an end that was inferior. You mean to use it for ulterior purposes. And you are saying to yourselves, in your day dreams, "With the equipment which I am getting, whether it be culture or scientific training, — whether I get it in the classical college or the technical school, or the commercial academy, I will seek and make my fortune. It is to this that all my train- WHAT FOR? 171 ing, whether physical or mental, Is tributary. I am to have a career In this world; an industrial career or a business career, or a professional career; and what I am living for Is to make that a successful career." "My fortune! My career!" These are the words about which thought is wont to gather, and toward which the streams of wishes and aspirations are apt to flow. To make a fortune or to have a career, are the controlling purposes of life. And the central Idea of each of these conceptions Is apt to be that of the magnet which draws to itself and attaches to Itself the sub- stances over which it has power. Here is the world, round about me, full of material goods, — gold and silver, houses and lands, furniture and equipage; full of Immaterial goods also — honor, station, social position. Influence, distinction — which a man may gain and enjoy; how much of all this can I attract to myself .f* This Is the com- mon way of stating the problem of life. Not all want the same things. Some want money and material good more than anything else; with the vast majority this is the dominating motive. When they speak of fortune it is in this lowest and narrowest sense that they use the word. Others care more for professional success, and others for literary and artistic distinction, and 172 COMMENCEMENT DAYS Others for political power and others for social rank and eminence; but with all those whose attitude of mind I am now describing the central question is how large a contribution they can get the world to make, whether of material or immaterial goods, for their use and enjoyment. To get the currents of wealth or fame or influence or popularity flowing toward them; to get out of this vast and multifarious store of benefits which the world holds, as much as they can, perhaps as much as they lawfully can, for them- selves, — this is, substantially, what they are living for. Let us suppose that you get all this. Let us suppose that you whose aim is the accumulation of wealth succeed in your ambition, — that you get the competency or the affluence you are dreaming of; that you get for yourself a beautiful home with all comforts and adornments and income enough to maintain it handsomely; enough to let you travel where you will and gather the harvest of eye and ear from fields of beauty and halls of song; enough to command for your- self the services of waiting men and waiting women; to surround yourself with all that can minister to your own ease and enjoyment, — when that is won, will you have secured for yourself that which is best worth living for? WHAT FOR? 173 Are you satisfied now to look forward to that as the goal of life, and to bend your energies to the attainment of that; to feel that when that is yours the prize of life is won? Or let us suppose that it is professional life to which your thought is directed, and that you succeed in winning a high place in your profes- sion, — so that your services are in demand, and you are able to select your own practice, and collect such fees as seem to the novitiates in your calling little less than miraculous; so that deference and honor shall be paid to you wherever you go, and the young men shall look up to you, and the old men shall be gracious to you, and you shall be able to add to your distinction abundance, and to your influence comfort and luxury, — so that the best things which the world has to give shall be yours for a wish. When all this is yours, will you feel that it is enough? If you could be certain of getting all this do you think now that you would be satisfied? Are you ready now to make this the end of your striving — the main thing to live for? Or suppose that it is a literary career or an artistic career on which you are setting out. And suppose that you can succeed in achieving great success — what the world acknowledges as great success, so that your books sell by the ten thou- 174 COMMENCEMENT DAYS sand, and your contributions are wanted by all the magazines; or so that your pictures are in great demand, and bring astonishing prices; or so that you can charge the cost of a king's ransom for playing one or two numbers, or singing one or two songs on a concert program, — so that you are famous all over the earth, and the crowned heads command you to perform for their benefit, and multitudes throng to do you honor, — when you have won all this, will it be all you want? To get for yourself such fame and praise and recognition as this — is it enough? Does it content you now to think that you may be able, by and by, to get the world to give you about all that you demand of it, — to lay its plaudits and its treasures at your feet? If you could have all that, would you feel that it was worth living for? These are not the lower and baser ambitions which I have conceived you as cherishing. I have not questioned your purpose of winning these things honestly: I am only trying to help you set before yourselves, in clear light, the kind of ultimate good you are aiming at, the prize of life as you dream of it, and I ask you whether it is really to these things and such as these that you are now ready to give your lives; whether you now think that your lives would be successful, if you should gain all this, — and nothing more. WHAT FOR? 175 I hope that before now some doubt may have begun to Insinuate itself into the mind of every one of you, whether these aims are large enough, — whether in getting all this you really come to your own. For you will observe that the kind of success of which I have spoken is the success of the magnet which draws everything to itself. I have helped you to conceive of your lives as powerful magnets drawing to you abundant tribute of wealth and honor and personal satisfaction; I think that I have done some of you no serious wrong in representing this as your habitual way of thinking about your future. But is this the normal thought about life.? It is the common thought, I fear, but is it the right way, the ra- tional way of thinking about \tt No; not of life. For this process which you have conceived of as going forward in your life, the process by which everything comes into your life, — by which your life becomes a reservoir into which all the world's contributory currents are flowing — this, if you will reflect, is not the manner of living things. It is the way of the magnet; it is not the way of life. The magnet attracts to itself all with which it has relations; the currents of force flow toward it. The living thing has commerce with the world in giving as well as in receiving. 1/6 COMMENCEMENT DAYS The tree gathers contributions from the earth and the air, not merely to attach them to itself, but to transform them and give them forth again refined and transfigured; so that the world is enriched by its existence. The tree has the power of taking to itself the salts of the soil and the nectar of the dew and the energy of the sun- shine, and in its laboratory of life recombining them into the graceful branch, the leafy canopy, the fragrant bloom, the luscious fruit, ministering grateful shade and enlivening beauty and re- freshing sustenance to man. The tree that gathered all these elements into itself and gave nothing forth could not be thought of as ful- filling its destiny. No living thing completes its life in this way. If you want to find analogy and warrant for such a career as that which you are meditating, you must descend from the kingdom of life to the inorganic realm. The trouble with your scheme of life is that it is unnatural. It is not life. You have been told, perhaps, that it is not the Christian life, — or that it is not the religious life; but that is an inadequate way of putting it; it is not life at all. It is a travesty, a caricature, a mutilation of life. The life that is life indeed does not follow any such law, in any of its kingdoms. The tree has given us a hint; let us see what WHAT FOR? 177 It signifies. Surely none of us wishes to live a life Inferior In its ruling principle to the life of the tree. The tree stands in Its environment, In the con- stant attitude of receptivity. Its life is open on every side to ministering Influences. The mois- ture in the mould Irrigates Its roots and fills Its veins with nourishing elements: the atmosphere bathes it with stimulating life, the sunshine pours down upon it the enkindling vigor of the realms above. There are no barriers between the tree and the environing powers which wait to re- plenish its life. It never behaves as If It were suflliclent unto Itself. It does not try to live a self-centered life. It accepts the fact of its constant dependence upon the elements In which it has Its being. You might say of It that every moment of its life is an unconscious prayer. It is because It always maintains, In its environ- ment, this attitude of receptivity. Imploring the gifts and blessings of earth and air and sky that its life abounds, and it Is able to Impart so abun- dantly Its own precious and peculiar benefits. Because it so freely receives It no less freely gives. Can it be possible that the human life has an environment any less friendly than that of the tree, or one with which It Is by its nature less closely related.'* Are there not round about the 178 COMMENCEMENT DAYS life of man, his higher life, his thoughts, his affec- tions, his will, ministering influences as close and stimulating and helpful as those which surround the plant? Is there sunshine and dew and the breath of life for the lower kinds and nothing like this for the invigoration of the higher kinds? Shall the tree pray always for more life and fuller, and have its prayer answered momently, while man stands under the infinite heavens, sullen, self-contained, unpraising, prayerless? No, it is certain that for that which is highest in man, for the life of his spirit, the provision cannot be less abundant or less accessible than that which is made for the life of the lower orders; and that there can be no good reason why the soul of man should not be in as close and constant relation to the ministering powers as is the unconscious tree. And it is certain that we are not living, in any true or real sense, unless we are as constantly receptive of the light and truth and love of the infinite Spirit, as the tree is of the elemental influences that minister to its life. Let me press this truth upon your thought, for it Is really the one truth that no man can wisely ignore, though so many men seem to be utterly oblivious of it. "God is round about us," as really, as closely, as constantly as the air and light are round about the growing plant. WHAT FOR? 179 He is pressing in upon our spirits by every avenue of thought and feeling; He is waiting to minister to us of His abundant fullness, to do for us all the while just what its environment does for the tree. And what is He, whom we call God, the infinite Spirit who thus surrounds our spirits with His life-giving influences, — who Himself constitutes the environment in the midst of which we live and move and have our being? What is the nature of this all encompassing divine Life? It is truth, it is purity, above all it is love, in- finite good will, infinite beneficence, the power that scatters benefit and blessing on every hand, that maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good and sendeth his rain upon the just and upon the unjust; the Providence that always seeks to crown our lives with lovingkindness! Suppose that He comes into our lives, shedding abroad therein all the awakening and life-giving energies of His love; suppose that we make this divine Love as welcome in our thought and pur- pose as the tree makes the dew and the sunlight, what will be the eflfect of it, what will the nature of our lives be after that? Do you think that the scheme of your thought, the strain of your life will any longer be summed up in gathering in, heaping up, hoarding, levying tribute upon the labor and the love and the loyalty of men. l8o COMMENCEMENT DAYS getting for yourself possessions, reputation, fame, distinction, power? No; I think that after you have opened free communication between your own life and its true spiritual environment, so that the divine energies shall steadily flow into your souls, your scheme of life will greatly change. Some new conception of what it means to live will take possession of your souls. You will be done, for one thing, with anxiety and worry, with the fret and the fever of greed and ambition, with the pushing and pulling of the eager competitions of the world; your heart will be at rest in the assurance that all things shall work together for good to them that love God. And then you will feel, you must feel, the throb and thrill of a great redemptive purpose within you — of a life that finds its fulfilment in service and sacrifice, in reaching out the helping hand, in wiping away the mourner's tear, in making glad the wilderness and the solitary place and in sowing the earth with light and gladness. Here is something worth living for. There is an uplift and an elation and a glory in this kind of life which no man can know so long as the instinct of an absorbent is the main motive of his conduct. When the youth gets this concep- tion, — when his spirit is once fully "oriented," — WHAT FOR? I8l so that the tides of the spirit flow into his soul with blessing and flow forth in bounty, then, as Mr. Dole has said, "he awakes to see that he is not here to lead a tiny separate life, but that he belongs to the universe. . . . His life answers back to the promptings of the life of the universe, and begins to exhibit the likeness of God. When once this change of attitude toward the larger and higher life has taken place in him ... we may say that it is well with him. He can now be trusted and depended upon; he will fit his place in the organic body of society. He has become a helper and friend of men; his life now assumes unity and takes on its proper beauty and character. There are many temptations from which he is henceforth clear. How, for example, can a man who really believes in a divine universe, do a deliberate injustice or stoop to a career of selfishness? . . . Let us agree that no youth is educated till . . . Good Will altogether possesses him, uses all his powers, and makes him its happy instrument. What else is a man for.? What higher life can he pos- sess.? . . . Here is that of which all the poets and prophets have sung. Here is that which all the saints and heroes have practiced. It is offered to-day as the crown of youth. Why should youth defer putting on its joyous crown? l82 COMMENCEMENT DAYS Why should men lead feeble, restless, crippled lives? Hear Robert Browning, the poet of real personality. Is it not splendid truth that he sings ? 'For life, with all it holds of joy and woe, And hope and fear, — believe the aged friend — ■ Is just the chance o' the prize of learning love, How love might be, hath been, indeed, and is; And that we hold thenceforth to the uttermost Such prize despite the envy of the world, And having gained truth, keep truth; that is all!' " IX GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES IX GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES TIIS is the end of the matter; all hath been heard; fear God and keep His command- ments, for this is the whole duty of man." These words are part of the conclusion of that remarkable book of Wisdom, put into the mouth of Solomon by some late writer, — in which as preacher, moralist, philosopher, critic and cynic he discourses widely of human problems and experiences, sometimes with insight and courage, sometimes in a querulous and despairing tone, mingling shrewd comments with dubious ques- tionings, and periodically coming round to the melancholy conclusion that "all is vanity and a striving after wind." It is rather difficult to get the net result of his estimates; sometimes he speaks with the accent of a clear conviction that God's in his heaven and that all's right with the world; sometimes he bears us down to earth with the dead weight of a dismal pessimism. But here at the end he comes out of the clouds into the open sky with a positive word, which we may take as his own summing up of the account. i8s 1 86 COMMENCEMENT DAYS "The end of the matter!" he cries abruptly. "All hath been heard," no more words are needed. "Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man." Duty you will ob- serve is in italic type in your Bibles; showing that it has been supplied by the translators: if we leave it out we get a larger meaning; it is the whole of man — not only his whole duty, his whole reward also, his whole happiness, his whole life. Only we must give to this word "fear" the larger meaning which it has gained for itself. Doubtless it meant originally to be afraid of God; that was the attitude in which men stood before their deities. They were afraid of them and they hated them; their whole religious aim was to outwit their gods and so escape their cruelties. But long before this Ecclesiast's day men had learned to believe in the benevolence of their God, and to trust in Him whose kindness endureth forever; and while they kept on using the old word fear they put into it a new meaning; they meant by it a loving and trusting reverence; the attitude of the filial child before a wise and benignant father. It is in this attitude before the Infinite Goodness and in the obedience which such an attitude inspires that the Ecclesiast finds the sum of human good. It is all well, he says, with the man whose thought turns rever- GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 187 ently and obediently to God; whose deepest wish is to do God's will. It is a familiar, simple, commonplace saying; the greater part of the meaning of life is in the truisms which everybody admits, but which most of us habitualfy disregard. I should like to use it as a starting-point for our thought; perhaps also it may prove to be our goal. I have been spending a considerable portion of my time for the last few weeks in the academic groves; I have seen long processions of graduates in caps and gowns filing past; I have been listening to the merry songs of the students, touched now and then with a tender pathos; I have watched the commencement pageant with some deepen- ing of the emotion which such scenes have always excited in me. They have never seemed to me quite so serious, quite so meaningful as they have seemed this year. For this there may be per- sonal reasons. It gives you something of a turn to see your first grandchild walking off with a bachelor's degree, especially if she is a girl; that is a vista through which you have never before looked down from the commencement stage and it has a scenery of its own. In all the other colleges I have found my heart with the grand- fathers and the grandmothers; I was sharing their point of view. The third generation brings l88 COMMENCEMENT DAYS a new bloom to the commencement roses and a new light to the landscape. But the real reason of the deepening interest is not personal. It is rather a sense of the growing criticalness of our common life; of the increasing importance of the personal and practical prob- lems which confront these graduates as they go out to find their tasks; of the uncertainties and perils and struggles by which they will soon be environed. I compare, in my own thought, the social con- ditions surrounding me when I finished my col- lege course and went out into the world, fifty-one years ago, with those which surround the young men and women who are going out to-day. It was a very different world; a world in which everything was settled and stable; what the open- ings were for young men; what the probabilities were, we knew pretty well; one could lay out his course and feel tolerably sure of keeping on in it; the field of enterprise was full of promising opportunities; there was little apprehension of any serious social changes. True, a great civil conflict was approaching; within two years the warrior with confused noises and garments rolled in blood would be stalking over the land; but of all this there was still no hint in those halcyon days. All was peaceful, settled, orderly; there GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 1 89 were political issues, of course, but nobody sup- posed that they would disturb the industries of the land or produce any dislocation of Its smoothly running social mechanism. In these days things are very different; the air is tremulous with portents of social change; the standing order Is challenged at every turn; the possibilities of old things passing away and all things becoming new are agitating all our hearts. Who can tell what questions these young people, now going out to the serious business of life, will have to meet; in what turbulent cur- rents they will soon be sailing; through what conflict and struggle they will soon be called to pass. One who has any sense of the pressure of social atmosphere, — one who feels In his bones the things that are coming to pass, — can hardly contemplate, without solicitude, the possibilities of the future. One finds, however. In what he sees and hears in these commencement days, some reassuring suggestions and reflections. The first Is the volume of the contribution which the colleges and universities are pouring into the life of the commonwealth. I have not taken pains to look up the figures, but I am sure that I cannot be wrong In my impression that the number of graduates from our higher insti- tutions of learning is increasing faster than the I9t> COMMENCEMENT DAYS population. Surely the number of students in the colleges and the universities is growing much faster than the population is growing. The great state universities, particularly, are all enlarging their membership at a splendid rate; and a small army of young men and women is going out from them this year into the active life of the nation. Now I am far from believing that a college educa- tion Is always and necessarily a guarantee of good citizenship; a man or a woman may get through college with low ideals and deficient moral sense, and may turn out to be a malefactor. But that Is not the rule. We may admit that our colleges might do better work than they do, in the sphere of character building, but the fact is that what they do is, in the great ma- jority of cases, something very valuable. The young men and women who come out of our colleges and universities have, in most cases, an equipment for work, and a stock of ideals which enable them to render efficient public service. I have watched this contribution which our higher schools are making to the life of the nation now for more than half a century; I have traced the influence of these college men and women, as they have taken their part in civil and national affairs, and while I have sometimes regretted that they did not count for more, I GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 191 have oftener been filled with gratitude and hope to see them taking hold intelligently and courage- ously of the tasks nearest their hands, and giving large reinforcement to all the better elements of the national life. The fact that the percentage of such helpers is increasing is a strong reason for encouragement. I do not believe that such men and women are often found in the ranks of the grafters or the bribers; and they are apt to be protected, by the ideals which they have learned to cherish, from many of the sordid and mercenary influences with which our public life is infested. Moreover, I think I cannot be mistaken In my judgment that the young men and women who have been emerging from these colleges, during more recent years, evince a keener interest in public questions, and a stronger grasp on social forces than was true of those who were graduated a quarter of a century ago. In all the higher institutions, the interest in the vital problems of society has been deepening. It is probably true that sociology and its cognate studies receive four times as much attention in our colleges generally as they did twenty-five years ago. Where the elective system prevails the courses dealing with these questions are apt to be among the most popular courses. The 192 COMMENCEMENT DAYS result is that our young men and women come out of college in these days with their hearts well kindled with social passion; with consider- able definite scientific knowledge of the problems that now press for solution, and with an earnest purpose to have a hand in working them out. I listened, the other day, to the graduating addresses of the six young women whom Vassar College selected to represent the class on Com- mencement Day; and three of the six were devoted to questions of a sociological character. What was more important was the spirit in which these addresses were conceived. It was evident that these college girls had been trained to see, and to see clearly, the things that were going on in the common life about them, and to feel, and to feel intensely, the human significance of these things. One would risk little in saying that those girls will have something definite and im- portant to do with the social life of the com- munities where they live. Last Sunday morning I sat in a grove, a silent listener to the prayers and testimonies of another group of girls, in their last college prayer meeting; and what struck me was the note of consecration, the outlook, the vision, the spirit of altruism, which found expression in all these words. They had caught the spirit of the Master, *'I am among GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 193 you as one that serveth." The burden of every heart seemed to be, *'What can I do to help?" Religion, as these girls had learned it, was fol- lowing Him who went about doing good. I could not help contrasting the spirit of this meeting with the spirit of the college meetings which I used to attend, where we were all so deeply interested about getting saved ourselves. It was clear that a finer type of religion is getting possession of human hearts. These, then, are the reassuring prospects and hopes that I bring back from my pilgrimage among the colleges. I have spoken of the testi- mony of the young women, but I do not think that the young men are less responsive to-day to the high calling of God. And while we have before us some serious problems, my faith is strengthened that these young men and women are going to give us strong help in solving them. I am speaking to some of these who have com- pleted their courses in the colleges or in the High Schools, and who are not going any further at present along scholastic lines. I wish that I could convey to them something of the sense of expectation and confidence with which the thoughtful people of the land are regarding them. We believe that the force which they are con- tributing to our national life will have much to 194 COMMENCEMENT DAYS do in shaping the destinies of the nation. We think that there ought to be among them men and women who will help to give coherence and direction to the moral and social passion which has been enkindled during the last decade. For surely we find ourselves, in the words of Mr. Ray Stannard Baker, "in the midst of a vast and chaotic, but profoundly fundamental outburst of moral enthusiasm . . . more like a religious revival than anything seen In this country in many years." And the remark of the same writer is equally true, that "mere moral en- thusiasm never of itself gets anywhere. It must be boiled down to its insoluble residue of hard, cold, clear, intellectual propositions. New def- initions must be struck out; the leader, with a sort of divine carelessness must announce his course and play his part." From some of you we may expect such service as this: you will help us to crystallize the seething criticism and aspiration of the time into practical rules of living. Let me make three simple suggestions which can claim no novelty. I. I hope that the graduates now entering upon the business of life will put themselves into close relations with the organized local community — with the city or the village or the countryside GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES I95 in which they find their home. I will speak chiefly of the city because these remarks are mainly intended for home consumption; though what I have to say may be easily applied to those whose homes are in the smaller populations. I trust that these graduates will interest them- selves immediately and actively in the life of the local community. Our most vital problems are to be worked out here. To make the life of the city more healthful, more pleasant, more attrac- tive, more interesting, more stimulating to the better nature of all citizens, more free from moral and social contagion, more neighborly and friendly; to lighten the economic burdens, for those now heavily laden, and to put within the reach of all at the lowest possible cost the benefit of the great co-operations; to study the conditions of those who are under the discipline of the laws and those who are the objects of the local philanthropies, that all these hapless people may be dealt with sanely and helpfully — all this is business in which I want to enlist the active interest and co-operation of the young men and women who are just entering upon practical life. I am sure that I do not speak to unresponsive hearts. The young people who are lately out of school and college have manifested their Interest in these matters in an unmistakable way. A 196 COMMENCEMENT DAYS good share of the work of this kind which is being done in this city is in the hands of our younger graduates. These local voluntary philanthropies have varied aims and purposes; there are many ways in which you can help to improve human conditions in the city; you cannot take part in all of them; select those which most strongly appeal to you and put your strength into them. On one feature of this social work let me put emphasis — it is that whose aim is to make the city more neighborly, — to bring the people of all the classes into more friendly relations. Such , is the principal design of the social settlements [and the social centers; it is not charity, in the I ordinary sense; the less there can be of this Iquality in it the better; it is friendliness that it seeks to promote; to get to know our neighbors better and to learn to co-operate with them for the common good. In the furtherance of this purpose the school extension movement is most significant and most promising; if the school- houses, which belong to the people, can really become social centers, and if the men and women living in the district, rich and poor, learned and ignorant can be brought together to study neigh- borhood problems and social and civic problems, we shall get our democracy upon a basis upon which there may be some promise of permanence. I GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 1 97 It must not be overlooked, however, that all this work for the betterment of city conditions largely depends on better city government. Bad or inefficient government can more than neu- tralize all that can be done by voluntary agencies for the improvement of municipal conditions. And you must have not only a good executive, you must have a good council; you must have a government that will work together. It is doubt- ful whether under the conditions that now prevail in most of our municipalities you can get good and efficient government without a considerable simplification of the governmental machinery. The average voter is overloaded with responsi- bility. The burden placed upon him is heavier than he can bear. He is required to select some scores of city officials; to determine upon the qualifications and adaptations of a great many different men, in regard to positions of whose work and demands he knows and can know very little. To put such a large responsibility of selec- tion upon the average voter is simply absurd. He cannot Intelligently discharge It. As a matter of fact he never tries to discharge it intelligently. He votes, at the primary and at the polls, for the candidates which his party managers place before him; in nine cases out of ten he has no opinion, nor any right to an opinion upon the qualifications 198 COMMENCEMENT DAYS of the candidates for whom he votes. Is this democracy? It is a bad counterfeit of democracy. We shall never have real government by the people until we bring the task of the voter some- where near his capacity. That is one of the things that you will help to do^. Get ready, I beseech you, to put your best gains of knowledge and trained faculty into the business of giving to the city where you live honest and efficient govern- ment. ^ 2. The second of the suggestions I thought to make is so comprehensive in its reach that I will content myself with merely mentioning it. It is that you give to national affairs the same conscientious attention that you bestow on municipal aifairs. The great problems of our national life press upon the minds and the hearts of all thoughtful men and women; the nation ■ will need, in the next decade, the best wisdom of all its citizens. You college men and women ought to be specially equipped to deal with these problems: you know something of history and political science; the experience of the world in handling such matters is not wholly unknown to you; you should be able to furnish some intelli- gent leadership to those who are trying to find the solution of these questions. What is more, the training which you have received has in most GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 199 cases largely been given you by the common- wealth, with the intent and the understanding that you should use it for the benefit of the com- monwealth. Upon you, therefore, the educated men and women of the nation, the obligation lies heavily to devote your best powers to such service of the nation as it may be within your reach to give. 3. The other suggestion is less obvious. You will not be able to escape some sense of responsi- bility for the service of the city and the service of the nation; but when I place before you the service of the church as one of your obligations some of you will be less inclined to assent. I desire, however, to secure from all of you some fair con- sideration of this claim. A good many of you are now communicants in the church; and some of you are loyal and efficient helpers of its work. To such there is no need of anything more than a word of grateful recognition of valuable service. There are others who were brought up in the church, and who were in close sympathy with it before they went to college but who have appar- ently come to feel less interest in its work, and who may, perhaps, be questioning with themselves whether they cannot find better uses for their time and energy than in the fellowships and the activities to which the church invites them. And 200 COMMENCEMENT DAYS there are others who, though they have always held the church in high respect, have never been identified with it and are not now seriously think- ing of it as one of the agencies which they could use in working for human welfare. Upon both these last classes I should like to urge some fair consideration of the claims of the Christian church. You young men and women coming out of college into the arena of the world's work, want to put your energies where they will do the most good. Consider whether the church does not offer you an opportunity which you can- not afford to disregard. There are churches and churches; I am well aware that there may be those with which you could not happily co-operate. But are there not some with whose aims and ideals you would find yourself in substantial agreement.? Few people ever attach themselves to any organization with whose principles and practices they are in absolute harmony; always there are points at which our assent hesitates, and tendencies which we would rather change. More or less of conces- sion is always necessary when two or more per- sons make up their minds to live and work to- gether. But most of you could find some Christian church with whose beliefs and ideals you were so far agreed that you could, without intellectual .^ J GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 201 dishonesty, connect yourself with it and co- operate in its work. And there are two or three considerations, which may incline you to do so. In the first place it is well to remember that the church is not an ephemeral institution; it has been here a good many centuries, it is here to stay, and whatever can be done to improve it and make it more efficient is work that promises permanent returns. In the second place the Christian church is the natural generator and magazine of the social forces by the aid of which society is to be renovated. There is no doubt about this. It is historically true that the altruistic and ethical and philanthropic movements which have re- moved so many of the evils of society, and have done so much to uplift and bless mankind, have their source and spring in the teachings and the life of Him who is owned and followed by Chris- tians as their Lord and Master. The institution whose bond of union is loyalty to him, and which has kept alive in the world the knowledge of Him, has some claims on all who love their fellow men. In the third place the church is, by eminence, the institute of religion. Its business in the world is to keep the thought of God alive in human experience. Its central function is worship. It brings men together, week by week, that they 202 COMMENCEMENT DAYS may listen to words which God has inspired; that they may lift up their voices in songs of praise and penitence to him; that they may join their hearts and their voices in prayer to him. If these services of the church are what they ought to be they help to awaken and to strengthen in men's hearts the sense of the presence of God, the reality of communion with him, the assur- ance of his active interest in all our human con- cerns. There was a time when God was a tremendous reality in the life of this nation; when the great majority of the people believed in him. Within the last quarter of a century, the sense of his presence has grown dim. The world has been so noisy that his voice was not heard; the smoke of our furnaces has obscured the heavens. It begins to be plain, even to the man in the street, that things go ill without him. It begins to be credible that religion is the vital fact and the central force in human life; and that a scheme of life which ignores or subordinates it Is sure to come to grief. And there are many, who have not hitherto banked heavily on spiritual Inter- ests, who are now listening when the wise man says: "This is the end of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this Is the whole of man." GOOD WORK FOR GRADUATES 203 It is to be hoped that the young men and women who hear this admonition will heed it. Neither the nation nor any of its citizens can afford to leave out of their account the fact of God. He is the greatest fact in any man's life: to be ob- livious of him is a melancholy impoverishment of human experience. You will need, in all your warfare against the evil, in all your struggle to realize the good, to have the sense of his presence alive in your hearts; and therefore, if for no other reason, it is well to frequent the places where, by the acts of worship which he has appointed, men unite their hearts to bring him near and make real to themselves his friendship. X LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS? X LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS? THERE was a man of the olden time who professed great humility, and I do not think that he was a hypocrite; I believe that he was a humble-spirited man. Yet I find this man writing to those whom he was trying to teach, "Be ye followers of me." Is not this a daring challenge.? Most modest men are loth to assert themselves, after this fashion. We rather deprecate the idea of setting up as models. "Don't look at me," we are wont to say: "Don't take me for a sample. I cannot claim to be worthy of imitation!" But Paul bids his Corinthian converts imitate him. He repeats this call several times in his epistles. He is not afraid to tell them, after he has gone away from them, to remember his conduct and follow it. Is this a mark of egotism.? I do not think so. I have no doubt that Paul lived among them a life which was really exemplary, a life which it would be safe for them to take as a pattern. It is doubtless possible for all of us to live in such a way that we could confidently call on those 207 208 COMMENCEMENT DAYS over whom we ought to have influence to follow our example. In all other departments of life such counsel is freely given by experts to ne- ophytes. The teacher of music, the teacher of drawing, the teacher of any art or craft hesitates not to say to his pupil "Imitate me; do as I do." Why should not the parent, the Sunday school teacher, the pastor be ready to say the same thing.? The point to be noted, however, in these words of Paul is that he was both a follower and a leader. It was because he was a humble and faithful follower that he was fit to be a brave and safe and enterprising leader. When, therefore, we put our question, *' Shall we be followers or leaders.?" we are entitled, by the experience and testimony of one of the greatest men who ever lived, to answer: We will be both. We could not well be the one without being the other. We could not lead in any intelligent and effective way unless we had first learned to follow, and we could not follow any high and worthy leadership without becoming leaders. This brings us in sight of a great law of all the kingdoms of life, that every living thing stands in this double relation of antecedent and conse- quent, of cause and effect, of progenitor and pffspring. The seed produces the plant and the LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS? 209 plant produces the seed. At one stage of its life it is in one relation, and at another stage it is in another relation. The one no more than the other is its true character. You might ask re- specting some human spirit about to be born into the world: "Shall he be a child or a man.^" The reply that Nature would make would be: "He shall be both. He cannot be a man without first becoming a child. It will be well for him, if in his childhood he is always reaching forth to the estate of manhood — if he is a manly boy; and equally well with him, if in his manhood he keeps much of the spirit of the child; only thus shall he enter into the kingdom of God." In much the same way must we answer the question now before us. All good leaders must first be true and faithful followers; all wise and loyal followers are sure to become good leaders. Let us assume then, first, that the art of fol- lowing — the business of following — is part of the regimen appointed for every man. The modern educational psychologists make much of this principle. They show that the imitative tendency must be relied on very largely in the earlier stages of education. Professor Baldwin says that a child does not begin to imi- tate until he is five or six months old, but "when the imitative impulse does come it comes in 2IO COMMENCEMENT DAYS earnest. For many months after its rise it may be called, perhaps, the controlling impulse. Its importance in the growth of the child's mind is largely in connection with the development of language and of muscular movement." Perhaps the largest single feat which the human being ever performs is the learning of a language in the first two or three years of his life, and this is wholly a process of imitation. Why does the child brought up in an English-speaking family speak English, rather than French or Italian.? Simply because imitation is the law of his being; he follows and must follow the speech that he hears. So with his general outfit of ideas and habits and customs — they are largely the product of imitation. *' Human beings," says Professor Mackenzie, "have an intrinsic relation to their society, in so far as their individual nature is formed and colored by it. . . . Each nation and tribe produces in its children its own type of character, which has grown up in it, through the influence of the physical surroundings and past history of the people. . . . After the individual has been produced, with his particular type of potential character, the direction in which that character develops is determined mainly by the habits and customs of his particular people and class. ..." LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS ? ill "Suggestibility" — that is the outlandish word which modern psychology has succeeded in im- posing on us and which, I suppose we shall be obliged to use; it means readiness to receive im- pressions from other minds, and to be guided by them. Hypnotic subjects are practically en- slaved in this way: that is a morbid development of this attribute of mind. But it belongs to all of us in a greater or less degree, and it is the organ by which a large part of our personal gains of knowledge and experience and character arc made, by which the fruits of civilization are con- served, by which the world's store of intellectual and artistic power is transmitted. It is true that by means of this trait of human nature superstition and error arc propagated, and millions are led into folly and misery. It is this tendency that explains such a phenomenon as Dowieism with the terrible catastrophe of finan- cial disaster and the shipwreck of faith which inevitably followed. The tens of thousands over whom this impostor was able to establish such an ascendency not only lost all the money they contributed to his crazy schemes, but most of them lost all their faith in man and in religion and in God. It is sorry logic by which they came to this conclusion, but if they had been logicians they would not have been disciples of Dowie. 212 COMMENCEMENT DAYS Such a career as his is a lamentable illustration not only of the readiness of people to be led, but also of their incapacity to choose safe leaders. These Dowieites were not, as a rule, bad people; they were honest, ingenuous, well-meaning folk to whom the downfall of the prophet they trusted proved a tragedy indeed. We have always before our eyes such instances of the evils which may result from the suggesti- bility of the masses. And yet, as I have said, even this lower and less rational form of unques- tioning imitation is used by Providence to ad- vance the welfare of mankind. "Most people," says Professor Cooley, " are so far suggestible that they make no energetic and persistent attempt to interpret in any broad way the elements of life accessible to them, but receive the stamp of some rather narrow and simple class of sugges- tions to which their allegiance is yielded. There are innumerable people of much energy but sluggish intellect who will go ahead — as all who have energy must do — but what direction they shall take is a matter of the opportune suggestion. The humbler walks of religion and philanthropy, for instance, the Salvation Army, the village prayer meeting and the city mission are full of such. They do not reason on general principles but believe and labor. The intellectual travail LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS ? 2 1 3 of the time does not directly touch them. At some epoch In the past, perhaps In some home of emotional exaltation, something was printed on their minds to remain there till death, and to be read and followed dally. To the philosophers such people are fanatics, but their function Is as Important as his. They are repositories of moral energy — which he Is very likely to lack — they are the people who brought in Christianity and have kept It going ever since. And this is only one of many comparatively automatic types of mankind.'' Still It must not be forgotten that this ability to receive suggestions and to be moved by in- fluences from without and above one's self, does not belong exclusively to the ignorant and the lowly. The greatest men are open to such In- fluences and move freely under them. Most of the great leaders have themselves been docile followers. Carlyle was, perhaps, one of the most positive intellectual forces of the nineteenth century, with a strong initiative and a great following; but one who reads FIchte's popular works after he has read Carlyle will find that Carlyle Is simply saturated with Fichte. Fichte himself was possibly the greatest moral force in Prussia when that nation rose to life after Its terrible downfall In the Napoleonic invasion; it 214 COMMENCEMENT DAYS was his burning words that kindled the spirit of resistance and heroic endeavor; but Fichte be- came the man he was because Kant in his " Critical Philosophy" opened to him the significance of life. By this he says he was led into "a new and nobler morality" and filled with a peace which he had never before experienced; "I propose," he declares, " to devote some years of my life to this philosophy, and all that I write, at least for some time to come shall have reference to it." Thus we see by whom this leader of leaders him- self was led. There are three great names among the English Broad Churchmen, Arthur Stanley, Charles Kingsley, Frederick Robertson, and it is easy for anyone who studies their biographies to see that the intellectual influence which had most to do with the shaping of the opinions of these men was that of Frederick Denison Maurice, a quiet man, their contemporary, whose powerful grasp on the great spiritual verities gave them their main constructive ideas. The great leader of the scientific renaissance of the nineteenth century one hardly needs to name. Was Charles Darwin a follower as well as a leader.? Let him answer for himself. He had just been reading in his youth Humboldt's "Personal Narrative." "This work," he says, ( LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS? 215 "stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science." It is not, then, the fools and the dupes alone who have been enthusiastic followers; the noblest and the strongest of mankind have confessed themselves disciples of those wiser than them- selves and imitators of those in whose characters they saw their own ideals realized. It may be true that in our younger years we are most in need of such guides and masters; but no really great man ever quite outgrows this need. "If youth is the period of hero-worship," says Professor Cooley, "so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to ex- pand one's self, to forget the rest, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life. 'Whilst we converse with what is above us we do not grow old but young,' and that is what hero-worship means. To have no heroes is to have no aspirations, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality and the narrow self." Therefore, young men and women, I hope that you will never cease to be ardent and en- thusiastic followers. When you have reached the point at which there is nobody above you to 2l6 COMMENCEMENT DAYS whom you can look up, and nobody ahead of you whom you want to overtake, you will be of very little use in this world; the sooner you are taken out of it the better for you and for your fellow men. Besides it is an obvious truth that in the vast co-operations of all kinds, industrial, civic, intel- lectual, by which our civilization is advanced, followers are needed as well as leaders. All can- not be captains in any company; some must train in the ranks. There is no man in society, no matter how exalted his position, who does not often find himself in relations in which the re- sponsibility for leadership belongs to some one else, and in which he can only help by faithful and loyal following. If he has not learned to work in harness, to subordinate his own personal notions and preferences, and to co-operate in realizing the plans of others, — even when these plans do not always seem to him entirely wise — he is not fit to be a citizen of a democratic re- public. One of the essential elements of good citizenship is the ability to follow your leader. It is hardly needful to add, that we are re- sponsible for the choice of our leaders. It is not to any blind loyalties that we are summoned: we must have good reason for our faith in those we follow. We must have ideals of our own, and LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS? 217 know their meaning, and have reason to believe that the men to whom we give our allegiance at best fairly represent those ideals. There is nothing better for us than to admire and follow worthy leaders. "We feed our characters, while they are forming," says Professor Cooley, "upon the vision of admired models; an ardent sym- pathy dwells upon the traits through which their personality is communicated to us — facial ex- pression, voice, significant movements, and so on. In this way those tendencies in us that are toward them are literally fed, are stimulated, organized, made habitual and familiar. . . . All autobiographies which deal with youth show that the early development of character is through a series of admirations and enthusiasms which pass away, to be sure, but leave character the richer for their existence. They begin in the nursery, flourish with great vigor in the school yard, attain a passionate intensity during adoles- cence, and although they abate rapidly in adult life, do not altogether cease until the power of growth is past." I counsel you, therefore, to cultivate your enthusiasms for the best men you know — the wisest, the strongest, the most unselfish and honorable men. Get acquainted with them if you can. Do not let your shyness or your self- 2l8 COMMENCEMENT DAYS depreciation hinder you from seizing upon op- portunities of coming into personal contact with those whom you most honor. To nothing am I more indebted than to a few friendships which I was able, in my mere youth, to form with men of great ability and high ideals. I am constrained to speak the names of some of them, — ^Josiah Gilbert Holland, Samuel Bowles, Mark Hop- kins, Richard Salter Storrs, George William Curtis, Howard Crosby, Horace Bushnell, John Bascom — -all these are gone to their reward. Other great men I have admired at a distance; but these were kind enough, in my young man- hood, though much older than I was, and stand- ing far above me — to number me among their friends; and the inspiration and enlargement of life which has come to me through their friendship is a precious and enduring possession. I know the value of such friendships with men to whom I could look up, — and I counsel you to lose no opportunity of putting yourselves under such influences. But we said, at the outset, that every man is called to be not merely a follower but also a leader. To be merely a follower — merely passive, and receptive, — is not the vocation of a man. The Christian ideal is simply the ideal of manhood; Christianity proposes to do nothing more for LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS? 219 any of us than to help us to be men. And Chris- tianity calls all men to be followers of a Leader that they in turn may be leaders. The Founder said to his first disciples, whom he found fishing by the lakeside, "Follow me and I will make you fishers of men," and the last word to men in the last book of the New Testament is "Let him that heareth say Come!" He who says "Come," must be one who is going forward himself and summoning others to go with him. The vocation of a Christian man — the voca- tion of a man — involves, then, this function of leadership. No one is so humble that he may not, if he is going in the right way, lead others in that way. It is a great error to conceive that the human race is divided into leaders and fol- lowers — some who always lead and never follow, — others who always follow and never lead. Every leader must often be a follower; every follower should always be a leader. Indeed it is impossible that it should be other- wise, in any normal society. The man who loyally follows good leadership will be so filled with the spirit of his leader that he must needs attract others; just as the iron that comes in contact with the magnet itself becomes a magnet. Yet I fear that there are many who do not clearly comprehend this part of their vocation. 220 COMMENCEMENT DAYS There are many who are quite too passive and negative, — who are suggestible enough but never suggestive; who are the echoes of other voices, but never speak out of their own knowledge and conviction. Quite too many haye we, in all our societies, political, artistic, educational, religious, who have no minds of their own, no wills of their own, who are not workmen but tools; not causes but effects. It is this class of persons to whom one of the younger poets * in a recent periodical, addresses these rather caustic inquiries: "Are You You.? Are you a trailer or are you a trolley.? Are you tagged to a leader through wisdom and folly? Are you Somebody Else, or You .? Do you vote by the symbol and swallow It straight.? Do you pray by the book, do you pay by the rate, Do you tie your cravat by the calendar's date.? Do you follow a cue? "Are you a writer or that which is worded? Are you a shepherd, or one of the herded? Which are you — a What or a Who? It sounds well to call yourself 'one of the flock,' But a sheep is a sheep after all. At the block You are nothing but mutton, or possibly stock: Would you flavor a stew? "Are you a being and boss of your soul, Or are you a mummy to carry a scroll, * Edmund Vance Cooke. LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS f 111 Are you Somebody Else, or You? When you finally pass to the heavenly wicket Where Peter the Scrutinous stands at his picket, Are you going to give him a blank for a ticket? Do you think it will do?" The words are somewhat unconventional, but they put rather pithily a question which most of us need to consider. For the true following is not slavish imitation; it always involves the appropriation of the impulse received from an- other, and the reaction upon it of a true insight and independent judgment by which the re- cipient makes it his own. This always involves some transformation of the impulse received; it is not just the same thing in the life of the follower that it was in the life of the leader; the impress of a new personality has been stamped upon it. Fichte owed to Kant the central and constructive ideas of his philosophy, but Fichte's restatement of Kant's principles is after all something quite fresh and new; and Carlyle uses Fichte's ideas in a very independent way; he has digested and assimilated them and they are as truly his own as if he had discovered them all. None of us needs to be ashamed to be a follower, but every one of us must be something more than a mere copyist or transmitter of energy; we must be centers of life and power. 222 COMMENCEMENT DAYS Two qualities are united in true leadership, self-reliance and sympathy. The leader must be an individual; it must be evident that he stands on his own feet and does his own think- ing; that what he speaks is not hearsay but per- sonal conviction; that he knows what he knows. That was what the people said about Jesus: "He speaks as one having authority and not as the Scribes." On the other hand, the leader must be in living touch with men, with all sorts of men. "Per- sonality," says Dr. Gordon, "stands for two things — the uniqueness of the individual and his universality. The uniqueness marks his reality, so that he does not blend in the social mass as the drop does in the ocean. The universality is his power of rational sympathy, the faculty by which he is able to share the thought, the passion and the purpose of the widest and noblest social whole." Both these qualities we need to cultivate, neither to the exclusion or the suppression of the other. We must be self-reliant men, and we must be men of largest and truest sympathy, k "Suc- cess," says Mr. Cooley, "in unfolding a special tendency and giving vogue to it, depends upon being in touch, through sympathy, with the current of human life. All leadership takes place LEADERS OR FOLLOWERS? 223 through the communication of ideas to the minds of others, and unless the Ideas are so presented as to be congenial to those other minds, they will evidently be rejected." To be a successful leader, you must have life in yourself, and you must have large power of sharing the life of your fellows. You must have something to Impart, and you must know how to put yourself Into communication with the minds and hearts of those whom you would lead, ^his function of leadership Is one of the highest possessed by man, and one of the worst abused. Satan, In Milton's mythology, Is the type of the bad leader, but there are many on the earth who have learned his methods only too well. The leader who gets his following by appealing to men's lower Instincts, by stimulating their ap- petites and their passions and their hatreds, by pampering their greed, by developing their selfishness is engaged in diabolical business. The political leader whose methods are mainly mer- cenary, who baits men with the spoils of office, who carries his points by the use of money In elections, by bribery and corruption, whose entire influence upon those with whom he comes in contact tends to the destruction of their ideals and the degradation of their character, — comes as near to doing devil's work as mortal man can 224 COMMENCEMENT DAYS come. The Influence upon politics of men like Croker and Quay and Murphy is more malign than any words can tell. To such a career as this I trust no young man who hears me will ever aspire. It is bad enough to walk in the down- ward way yourself; but to lead others in that way; to help in lowering the standards, and poison- ing the thoughts and perverting the characters of your fellows, — above all to encourage them in be- coming traitors to the commonwealth, or parasites upon its life, or plunderers of its treasure, — this involves a moral degradation and a doom to which I hope none of you will expose yourselves. On the other hand, there is nothing more en- nobling than good leadership, — whether to the leader or to the led. To appeal to all that is best in men; to quicken and stimulate their sense of justice and truth and honor; to hold up before them the ideals of character and service; to en- list them in work that deepens their humanity and enlarges their patriotism, — this is labor which needs no other compensation than the privilege of doing it. It is the kind of work which is greatly needed, just now, in the church and in the nation; and I trust that many of you may not only be loyal followers of that which is good, but brave and true leaders of men and women in the ways of life. ( XI FORM AND SUBSTANCE XI FORM AND SUBSTANCE IN an ancient writing familiar to some of us, judgment is passed on those having the form of godliness, but wanting the power thereof. The form without the power, — it is not a rare phenomenon. In the mechanical realm we sometimes see a machine discon- nected from the powers which should give it motion. Wheels and cranks and pinions and gearings are all in evidence; the machinery is properly fashioned and all the adjustments are here except that which attaches it to the motive power. So long as this is lacking the mechanism is motionless; if for any reason that motive power cannot be supplied it is worthless; all its struc- tural perfection becomes a pitiful waste. In our childhood we were sometimes offered for our diversion the form without the power in the shape of dumb watches, wooden guns and other toys of similar character — simulacra of things which employ energy. To many of us, I dare say, these toys were wont to give more dis- content than pleasure; the unreality of the thing 227 228 COMMENCEMENT DAYS is apt to irritate the boy's mind; the real watch and gun, when he gets them, afford him a grati- fication which has been enhanced by his mental revolt against the effigies which have been im- posed on him. In the mechanical realm, how- ever, the form is rarely disconnected from the power; the futility of that is sufficiently obvious. Most sane persons are aware that a steam engine without a boiler or a waterwheel by the side of a dried up stream would be foolish investments. But when we rise into the Kingdoms of life and mind, the form without the power constantly confronts us. We begin with dolls and toy ani- mals, and we go on through all our lives sur- rounded by objects which represent living things though there is no life in them. The realm of art is largely devoted to such representations. The Memphian reliefs, the Sphinx in the desert, the Elgin marbles, the lions of St. Mark, the marvels of the Vatican and the Louvre, the beasts of Barye, the figures of Rodin, the statues of St. Gaudens, the whole wonder-world of modern sculpture and not less of painting — land- scapes as well as figures — exhibit to us 'the age- long effort of the human mind to represent form without life. We must not say that all this is abnormal and fictitious; there must be a place in our world for forms of life that are destitute FORM AND SUBSTANCE 229 of its power. The purpose of these representa- tions is to assist us in discerning and delighting in the forms of beauty which nature is evermore producing. Our attempt to imitate the work of life may spring from a profound reverence for the power whose work we are copying. The statue or the picture gives us the form without the life, but imagination supplies the life behind the form and rejoices in it. Art has its function and its ministry and ought to be the handmaid of morality. When we ascend into the supersensuous realm, the divorce between form and power or form and life seems less admissible. The form of godliness without the power thereof is not a thing to be admired. The same would be true of meekness or humility or courtesy or kindness. The sem- blance of a natural object may be a serviceable possession; are we justified in seeking to produce the semblance of an act of worship.^ Clearly we have now passed into a realm where the art im- pulse must no longer bear rule. Form without power is here a ghastly impertinence. The counterfeit presentment of prayer, of praise, of religious service must be as offensive in the sight of the eternal Reality as anything can be. When we are dealing with Him there is no room for masks or pretenses. 230 COMMENCEMENT DAYS Yet there are forms In all worship and religious service; must these lie under condemnation? Forms of praise, forms of prayer, beautiful hymns, stately litanies, words of salutation and of bene- diction — more or less of all these abides in all our religious observance. Catholic and Quaker differ in the use of such instruments only in degree. What must we say of these? We must not say that they are necessarily forms without life; they are forms which life has created; they are words in which devout hearts found utterance; and to words belong a certain power of retaining and reincarnating the life that gave them being. Jesus said, "The words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life." That was true when the words were spoken, it is true of them still. Of all words which are the sincere utterance of great lives the same may be said. The liturgies, the hymns, the well-worn phrases of our common worship were the sincere words of devout souls, and it is pos- sible for us, in some good degree, to put our- selves in their places and to realize the meaning of their words; and so far as we are able to attain to this the form is not without power. After all is said, however, we must still confess that there is a sad disparity in our world between the form and the power of godliness. Vast are FORM AND SUBSTANCE 23 1 the enclosures of devout observance, of decent ceremony, which are full of emptiness. If we could only fill all the pious words which are dally spoken with real meaning; If we could only secure a genuine wish for every prayer, and a hearty purpose for every promise, how quickly would the city of God descend from heaven and fill the earth! Is not the problem of religion to-day mainly this: to find contents for empty forms; to replenish vacant ceremonials; to lessen the chasm between profession and performance? I have dwelt upon this particular phase of the lack of correspondence between form and power because these Illustrations are familiar. In many other departments of human Interest, however, we observe the same conditions. In philanthropy, for example, the excess of form over power Is significant. If we study the mechanism of our philanthropies, public and private, and compare what is devised and ad- vertised with what Is done the result is depress- ing. Much of the machinery hardly moves, only a small part of It Is efficient and productive. Apparatus we have In abundance, and we even manage to collect and distribute a large amount of money, but there is a serious lack of vital power in much of our philanthropy. Nothing ought to bear this great name which does not 232 COMMENCEMENT DAYS promote human welfare. Temporary alleviation of bodily discomfort which only tends to produce moral deterioration is not philanthropy. What a vast change would pass upon the face of our society if the forms of philanthropic service could all be filled with the power of a true philan- thropy. Of freedom, too, we have in this democratic state far more of the machinery than of the motive power. What is democracy .f* It is the rule of the people, and, presumably, of people who are fit to rule. It implies the intelligent partici- pation of all the citizens in the government. It requires of every voter an independent judg- ment upon public questions. Every man must be trained to think and decide; in the multitude of such counsellors there is safety. This is the theory of democracy; we have it here on paper; our constitutions enfranchise all male adults, and promise the enfranchisement of all females; and our election laws provide for ascertaining the will of the people, but will anyone say that the will of the people is intelligently and fairly ex- pressed in our elections ? Is that a true democracy in which a considerable percentage of the voters sell their suffrages for money? Is that a true democracy in which most voters find themselves at most elections shut up to a choice among two FORM AND SUBSTANCE 2^ or three sets of candidates, few of whom they know and fewer of whom they trust? All these illustrations help to bring before us the truth with which we are more particularly concerned to-day — the truth of the disparity in the popular intelligence between the forms of learning and the power thereof. Of the shows and semblances of culture we have much; of the substance we have something less. The super- ficiality of much of our modern education needs not to be demonstrated; it takes abundant opportunities of advertising itself. It is not to be expected that any system of education would give us perfect results. But we might reasonably hope to come a little nearer to perfection. We teach our children to read, we say. This is the educational minimum. Below this we do not propose to suffer anyone to fall. Our ambi- tion is to put the power within the reach of all, and our boast is that we so nearly realize our ambition. Here now Is a simple and convenient test of our educational methods. Are we really teaching our children to read? Some of them can; I will not venture on percentages. But It Is obvious that many who pass the final examina- tions with credit have not learned to read. They may pronounce most of the words with tolerable 234 COMMENCEMENT DAYS accuracy, but give them a serious page of history or description and bid them read it, and then close the book and tell you what it is all about, and a large share of them cannot do it. Any high school teacher will tell you that a con- siderable proportion of those who come up from the elementary grades are in some such condition as this. They have mastered the art of reading as to its form, but its substance has escaped them. That reading is simply apprehending and appro- priating the thought of the writer, they have not understood. It is notorious, of course, that many a boy learns all the processes of arithmetic without knowing how to apply them to practical problems. I am not disposed to put the whole blame for this superficiality on the public schools. If in education there is a good deal of surface work, and much teaching that is pretentious rather than thorough it is because there is an urgent popular demand for this sort of thing. The dis- position to care for the outside, to be content with the merest smattering of knowledge is too prevalent. We have heard of institutions that promise to impart a sufiicient knowledge of any of the ancient or modern languages in six months; and I have known a chartered college to give the degree of Bachelor of Arts to one who FORM AND SUBSTANCE 235 had never attended a recitation or passed an examination. It is a case of supply and demand, in which demand creates supply and supply in its turn stimulates demand. Multitudes of our young people are in great haste to begin the work of life; long periods of preparation are irksome; they are more than ready to listen to those who assure them that a smattering of language and of science is all they need. I am not unmindful of the fact that our wisest educators are constantly striving against this tendency, and that in many of our best institu- tions the demand for substantial results is steadily rising. And yet we must confess that among the people who are said to have been educated in these schools, we still find symptoms of a de- plorable lack of the power of sound thinking. Study the contents of our daily newspapers of largest circulation. To what shall we attribute this hysterical rhetoric, these flatulent narratives of events that have no significance, this prodig- ious enterprise in gathering up and working over the disgusting and harrowing details of vice and crime. Measure the space which has been given in American newspapers to a personage like Harry Thaw. We are told by the managers of these news- papers of vast circulation that they are only 236 COMMENCEMENT DAYS supplying the popular demand. This Is, per- haps, not quite the whole truth. They are help- ing to create the demand. But are the people who demand this sort of thing educated people.? Have they learned to think.? Have they learned to read.? Is the most popular daily newspaper of the present day the fruit of our present system of public education.? If it is not, what is it.? Consider the success which those preposterous endowment orders were winning, but a few years ago, all over the country. Sixty or seventy of them were reported as operating, not in the wild west, but in Massachusetts; and their constit- uency included multitudes of clerks and profes- sional men and school teachers. All these people had presumably studied arithmetic in the public schools, and had been taught to add and subtract and multiply and divide, and knew something about the current rates of interest; yet they were able to believe that three hundred dollars, all told, in monthly installments, would bring them, at the end of seven years, one thousand dollars; — that a financial institution promising such returns as these offered them a safe and reasonable investment for their money. Are the people educated to whom the absurdity of schemes like these is not, at a glance, apparent.? Reflect upon the prevalence in all our com- FORM AND SUBSTANCE 237 munities of crazy preternaturalisms, which are utterly destitute of rational or historical founda- tions, and which presume a degree of credulity that would have been natural to wild Africans or Patagonians, but that can hardly be accounted for in civilized peoples of the twentieth century. '*: The Dowieites were generally graduates of our \ schools. Pastor Russell collects his devotees among people who can read and write. The Mormons are not, as a class, illiterate, by our standards. The same thing must be said of the throngs who crowd the tabernacles and stuff the coffers of a present-day evangelism which has no diffi- culty in convincing the multitude that the theology of the Dark Ages and the spirit of the Inquisition and the coarseness of the fish-market and the greed of the wheat pit are fitting illustra- tions of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Study the campaign literature scattered all over this continent by secret organizations which boast of millions of voters, and be amazed at the grotesque and preposterous forgeries and fabrications, which are swallowed without ques- tion or protest by hundreds of thousands of the ministers and members of American Protestant churches. I will not extend these illustrations. But do 238 COMMENCEMENT DAYS not symptoms like these, the tale of which could easily be multiplied, indicate some reason for the misgiving that when we call ourselves an educated people we need to qualify the affirma- tion. And after such a survey is not the question forced upon us whether the popular intelligence on which, in this country, we must wholly rely for the solution of those critical questions of economics and ethics and politics which now confront us, is sound and strong enough to bear the strain which we are putting upon it? It may seem faithless and unpatriotic to ask the ques- tion, but I am constrained to ask it. And I fear that we must say that while our systems of education give to the great majority of our citi- zens certain rudimentary forms of learning, of the trained intelligence and the disciplined judg- ment which are necessary for the wise adminis- tration of the great affairs of the church and the nation there is yet a vast deficiency. It would be difficult, I think, to overstate the extent of this deficiency or the peril to the state which it involves. The easy-going optimism of Amer- icans always ignores or denies it; for this over- confidence we are likely to have a large account to settle at no distant day. It may be said, it is always said, that the popu- lar intelligence has been able, thus far, to conduct FORM AND SUBSTANCE 239 the nation safely through Its perils; and there is ground of hope here of which we ought to make as much as we can. But if we would be entirely sane in our judgment we must recognize the fact that the conditions which we now confront are quite different from those through which we were passing during the war of the Rebellion, and the war of the Revolution. The last great struggle Involved two very simple questions which the least educated people could easily understand: the question of the rightfulness of slavery and the question of the Integrity of the nation. Reduce political issues to terms as simple as these and you may safely trust them to the common sense of a very poorly educated people. In the times of the Revolution, and especially in the years following the Revolution, when the political fabric was reconstructed, certain political problems of the first order had to be solved, and every American is proud of the skill and sagacity exhibited by the framers of our Constitution. Have we not men of equal ability and probity to whom we might now confide the great task committed to us.^ I will not doubt that such men might be found, though the standard set by that great Constitutional Convention at Phila- delphia was a high one. But is there any chance, 240 COMMENCEMENT DAYS as things are now going, of getting our great problems Into the hands of these capable men? One hundred years ago the people seem to have been aware that none but men of the highest Intelligence and the broadest experience were capable of dealing with such difficult concerns. Such men they found, and followed their leader- ship. This generation has had thrust upon its hands questions far more difficult and intricate than those with which the men of 1787 were compelled to deal. The whole economic structure of so- ciety Is shaking under the agitations of our social life; an industrial revolution certainly no less momentous than the political revolution of the eighteenth century Is now threatened; and we do not seem to be at all aware of the fact that we need skilled and experienced leaders for this exigency. Indeed it would appear that the men who are competent to deal with these questions are the very men for whom the people have no use. The scholars, the "college professors," generally In derisive quotation marks, the "high- brows," — the men who know something of the history and experience of the world, are the men whose judgment is apt to be spurned and whose counsels ignored. This is the tone of the average political leader — of the average news- FORM AND SUBSTANCE 241 paper. As a people we are quite apt to resent the interference in political affairs of men of trained intelligence and disciplined judgment. Are not we, forsooth, all educated people.? Have we not had the advantages of the public schools.? Are we not capable of deciding, off hand, these great questions of economics and social organiza- tion.? So every demagogue on the stump or in the sanctum assures the dear people, and why should they not believe it.? For these reasons, therefore, — because the ques- tions now upon our hands need a broader wisdom than any which we have hitherto required, and because we are now, as a people, so little conscious of this need, the deliverances of the past hardly warrant the confident expectation of present de- liverance. We need for this hour a quality of popular intelligence altogether higher, clearer, sounder than has ever been called into exercise in this nation or in any other; the form of it we have, the conceit of it we have abundantly, the substance of it, the power of it, I greatly fear that we have not. The sober words of a great and wise friend of this nation, Lord Bryce, deserve our candid consideration. "The Americans," says Lord Bryce, "are an educated people, compared with the whole mass of the population in any European 242 COMMENCEMENT DAYS country except Switzerland, parts of Germany, parts of Norway, Iceland and Scotland; that is to say, the average of knowledge is higher, the habit of reading and thinking more generally diffused, than in any other country. . . . That the education of the masses is nevertheless a superficial education goes without saying. It is sufficient to enable them to think they know something about the great problems of politics; insufficient to show them how little they know. The public elementary school gives everybody the key to knowledge, in making reading and writing familiar, but it has not time to teach him to use the key, whose use is in fact, by the pressure of daily work, almost confined to the newspaper and the magazine. So we may say that if the political education of the average American voter be compared with that of the average voter in Europe it stands high; but if U be compared with the functions which the theory of the American government lays on him, which its spirit implies, which the methods of its party or- ganization assume, its inadequacy is manifest.^^ For, as Mr. Bryce goes on to show, the respon- sibility laid on the American voter is far heavier than that imposed on voters in the free countries of Europe. In England, for example, all that the citizen is called to do for the national govern- FORM AND SUBSTANCE 243 ment is to elect members of parliament. Not only are the issues of policy settled by the Parliament but all national executive officers are chosen by the same body. But *'the American citizen is virtually one of the governors of the republic. Issues are decided and rulers selected by the direct popular vote." The amount of trained intelligence, of disciplined judgment required of an American voter Is far greater than is needed by the voters In most European countries. For such tasks and responsibilities as we have laid on him, is not the equipment which he receives altogether insufficient.^ The disparity between the popular intelligence and the tasks laid upon It in this country Is not, then, due so much to the fact that popular educa- tion among us is Inferior to the best of other countries, as to the fact that the work given it to do Is immeasurably heavier here than there. It Is this — let me say it over many times — which makes the situation before us so grave and critical. Yet it ought not to be supposed that the condition which we are considering — the disparity between the form and the substance of culture — Is peculiar to this country. It Is the characteristic of the age in which we are living. It Is the result of the rapid extension, within the past century, of the opportunities and preroga- 244 COMMENCEMENT DAYS tives of education. I suppose that It Is Inevitable, in such a case, that the form should be enlarged much more rapidly than the substance Is sup- plied. The new rich easily and quickly provide themselves with the externals of gentility, but it takes a generation or two to furnish the reality, during which period we have a sort of thing which is much less lovely than the homespun simplicity which has been left behind. And something like this is seen In the Intellectual development of the present century. It Is an Englishman of philosophic mind who has given us a striking comparison between the causes which produced the Dark Ages, and those which are operating In the intellectual world at the present time. He shows us how the best social ideals of Greece, flung Into the weltering barbarisms of Europe, had to wait a thousand years before they could fully organize its life. Similarly "the dawn of the French Revolution and the outburst of Ideas contemporary with It," have enormously en- larged the mere external forms of culture without supplying their substance. "Have we not," he asks, "as a consequence of the great renaissance of a hundred years ago, attained an advance which no one has rightly estimated, at the cost of a retrogression which no one has rightly under- stood.^ What we have attained is the universal FORM AND SUBSTANCE 245 right to argue, to have an opinion, to be heard through the speech on the platform, the book, the pamphlet and the newspaper — the recogni- tion that civilized man enjoys as his common birthright the form of articulate human intelli- gence. What, by this very advance, we have lost for the time, is the adequacy of the substance of culture to its form. Never before, in the his- tory of the human race, have the facilities of thought and expression been so distributed as to render possible so wild and immeasurable an ocean of error. For positive error — and this is the simplest statement of my meaning, — has now taken the place of ignorance. ... If early Christianity took on its shoulders the spiritual welfare of the masses in a very narrow sense, the nineteenth century has taken on its shoulders their intellectual and moral welfare in the very broadest and deepest sense. Do we suppose that enormous benefits to the race can be ob- tained without paying a price.? A glance at those countries where education in the general or formal sense is most universal and best appre- ciated, will assure us of the contrary. There is nothing which large sections of the educated populace (in all ranks of society) will not believe. There is no absurdity so gross as not to find its able journalistic supporters. There is no 246 COMMENCEMENT DAYS opinion which is not maintained, by persons equipped with full powers of articulate expres- sion, with a granite obstinacy and indifference to reason and experience. There is nothing so bad in art and literature that it will not be welcomed with exultation by an enthusiastic crowd, quite capable of maintaining their conceptions in lan- guage to all appearance not unworthy of the re- public of letters. Of this republic, I repeat, all men are now in theory qualified citizens, and it wants but little for them to take up the external privileges of citizenship." If these are true words, then the condition we are confronting is one that we share with all pro- gressive nations. But the universality of the disorder does not reduce its danger. And we have already discovered reasons why this danger is greater here than anywhere else. These are very serious reflections, my friends; they do not contribute, I fear, to the hilarity of these festivities; it is not the kind of message to which most of us prefer to listen. It is the testi- mony of one who does not believe that an op- timistic drifting upon prevailing currents is good policy for this nation at this hour. This nation has chosen to commit its momentous problems to the arbitrament of the popular intelligence. Never, in all history, were rulers summoned to FORM AND SUBSTANCE 247 deal with questions of policy more Intricate, with tasks of administration more grave than those which the voters of this country are now con- stantly required to act upon. From this tribunal of the populace there Is no appeal. If anyone thinks that the popular Intelligence is adequate to this emergency he ought to be very comfortable in his mind. If anyone Is In doubt about It he ought not to hold his peace. And yet, this is no time for jeremiads. He who interprets these words as the counsels of despair misses their meaning. They are the words of one who believes that this nation ought to live and that what ought to be may be. Yet with nations as with men there is no salvation for any who will not work It out for themselves — albeit with fear and trembling. The need of the hour as I see it is to arouse educated men and women to an apprehension of their responsi- bilities. The duty of the hour is to fill these forms of popular intelligence with their proper content. That duty rests upon the educated men and women of this country. From all our higher institutions of learning they are going forth, every year, in increasing numbers. Here is the strongest foundation of our hope. These young men and women, in all our colleges and higher schools are entering, with a keen and 248 COMMENCEMENT DAYS strenuous interest, Into the studies which relate to citizenship. The increase in the number pur- suing such studies, and In the enthusiasm with which they are pursued Is a notable feature of our recent educational life. Soon we shall have, scattered through all our communities, many thousands of men and women with the right to an opinion on the great aifairs of state, with the habit of scientific investigation which will deliver them from the snares of a reasonless partisanship, and with some fair equipment for safe and in- telligent leadership. Leaven enough is thus pre- paring to leaven the whole lump. But one thing is needful. The leaven must be mingled with the mass through and through, — thoroughly kneaded in. Every housewife knows what happens when the leaven is not mingled with the meal, but is suffered to lie by Itself In fermenting and putrefying aggregations. Not only does it fail of its function; it spoils the very substance it was meant to make nutritious. The condition of light and wholesome bread Is such a laborious kneading as shall distribute the leaven so that every particle of the flour shall be brought in contact with its quickening Influence. The kingdom of heaven Is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, until the whole was leavened. There Is something sig- FORM AND SUBSTANCE 249 nificant In that word "hid." The leaven only does its work well when it loses its own separate life, and merges itself in the substance with which it is mingled. Not otherwise is it with the culture which our colleges and universities provide. If it separate itself from the community, if it become exclusive and unsympathetic, if it serve to erect a barrier between those who have it and those who have it not, so that social classes are formed by it and we find the cultured and the uncultured set over against each other in indifferent or anti- pathetic relations, there we have the same kind of poisonous and destructive influence at work that we see in the unmingled leaven. There are few things more deadly in a democracy than learning for its own sake, or learning which feeds pride and kills sympathy and weakens the sense of public responsibility. And the culture which would serve and save must not be setting itself on high, and contrasting itself with the environ- ing ignorance; it must be content to humble it- self and share its light with the lowly, and pour the treasures of its grace and truth into the hearts of the poor. The work to be done by the edu- cated classes for their country is not chiefly the work of organizing societies and holding conven- tions, and forming clubs and writing papers, 250 COMMENCEMENT DAYS it is rather the work of putting themselves into personal, vital, helpful relations with their nearest neighbors, whose circumstances have been less favorable than their own and to whom by the contact of mind with mind, of life with life, they may be of the highest service. I have spoken of the fact that the counsel and leadership of educated men is apt to be spurned by those who most need it. There is more than one reason for this. The fault is chargeable, in part, upon the uneducated; for the conceit and arrogance of ignorance, or of that little learning which often replaces it, is apt to be colossal. But there is blame, also, with the educated people who have lost the power of leadership; whose culture has weakened the organic filaments that should bind them to their kind. No man is truly educated unless his sympathies have been broadened and deepened, and his sense of social responsibility has become quick and keen. The one thing needful is that the men and women who have had the advantages of the higher education should be able to put themselves into friendly and sympathetic relations with all the people round about them. Love is the only medium through which sweetness and light can be com- municated. In winning the leadership which belongs to FORM AND SUBSTANCE 25 1 culture one temptation must be shunned. In avoiding the Scylla of excluslveness, keep clear of the Charybdis of sycophancy. The flattery of rulers Is almost always a hideous crime. Rulers, especially If they be absolute, do not stand In need of flattery. It Is their weakness, rather than their strength, of which they most need to be reminded; It Is the tremendous responsibilities resting on them which ought always to be em- phasized. Rather bring home to the sovereign his shortcomings; point out to him the fatal blunders into which his conceit and pride of power have led him; show him that humility and docility are royal virtues. There have been courtiers and court preachers who have dared to do this, and above most men we honor them, while we despise the base creatures who always flatter the tyrant, and make him think that his crimes are virtues and his blunders inspirations. Now all this holds good whether we are dealing with a sovereign monarch or with the sovereign people. The flattery of a ruler, whether he be despot or demos, is an immeasurable wrong. We Americans have had much to say about lying courtiers, and flunkeys, and toad-eaters; but I fear that there Is no country in the world where the race of sycophants is more numerous or more cowardly than In this country. On the stump, 252 COMMENCEMENT DAYS on the platform, in the pulpit, in the sanc- tum we are all the while flattering our rulers; cultivating conceit in them more than a wise humility; assuring them that they know it all when indeed they greatly lack wisdom; humor- ing their errors instead of exposing them; con- firming their evil ways instead of reproving them. All this kind of work the demagogue will con- tinue to do; it is his trade; but the educated men and women of the land must have no part in it. It is for them to see life steadily, and see it whole, and tell no lies about it. It is for them to bear witness to the truth, whether it is popular or unpopular; to give no countenance to the fal- lacies and delusions of the crowd; to expose, with a quiet temper, but an unflinching logic, the sophistries of the demagogues. The work that could be done in any community, in enlightening, correcting, disinfecting, invigorating public opin- ion, by the educated men and women of that community, if they would courageously and judiciously put themselves into vital relations with their neighbors, is a work whose value passes computation. This is the way, it appears to me to be the only way of salvation. The popular intelligence must, in some way, be cleared and informed; I know not how it can be accomplished unless the educated men and women of this FORM AND SUBSTANCE 253 country who have no selfish ends to compass and know that they have none, shall give them- selves to the task with courage and consecration. I may be asked whether I am not overlooking the spiritual forces; whether the purification of the hearts of men and the enkindling of unselfish motives are not the primary concern. No; I am not overlooking nor undervaluing these forces; it is true that a new spirit and a new purpose are essential; and it Is especially true that all men need to learn that the service of the state is no less sacred, no less religious than the service of the church. But, after all, the pure motive will avail but little, in the great business of political administration, unless the directing in- telligence is sound and strong. An unselfish spirit, a Christian purpose, is an excellent thing in the captain of a ship, in the locomotive en- gineer, but it Is not enough. He must understand the mechanism entrusted to him, and know how to control it. How much less is mere benevolence of disposition an adequate equipment for the great responsibilities of governing a nation like this — responsibilities that rest on the voters of this country and nowhere else. There is no salvation for a democracy except in the trained intelligence and the disciplined judgment of the voters. And I know not how the voters of this 254 COMMENCEMENT DAYS land are to acquire this kind of intelligence un- less the men and women who possess it shall devote their lives to imparting It to those round about them who have it not. Would God that some such message as this might reach all the young men and women who are going forth in this month of June from the doors of our Colleges and Universities, and with them all the rest who have gone forth in other years, and have found or are seeking a place to stand somewhere on this broad continent! Would God that some sense of the responsibilities of culture in a Republic like ours might rest on all their souls! To them has been committed the power of saving this nation from anarchy and chaos. • God help them to discern their high calling! The discipline they have won, the knowledge they have gained, the outlook over the ages to which they have attained — these high possessions and prerogatives are not theirs to hoard and use for their own delectation. It is not to companionship with congenial minds; it is not to dilettante delights in things pleasant and graceful that they are called, but to that larger ministry which shall put their best gains at the service of those most needy. They are wanted In the churches, not merely as critical auditors once a Sunday, but as teachers in the FORM AND SUBSTANCE 255 mission schools, as visitors among the poor, as helpers In every labor of love. It Is not for what they can get for themselves out of this relation that they are called Into It; It is for what they can give In an association that puts them into direct contact with all sorts and conditions of men. There are no opportunities like these for those who have a mind to serve. They are wanted In the Charity Organization Societies and the Village Improvement Societies and the Home Culture Clubs; they are wanted in the Citizens' Leagues and the Civic Federations and the Good Government Clubs; they are wanted on the School Boards, in the City Councils, — they are wanted wherever there is a chance of co-operation with others, for the bringing in of the kingdom of good will. To this high summons they will not be recreant In this hour of the country's deepest need. For they must have heard, most men of discernment must be hearing, every day, the same august admonition that the poet heard at Concord Bridge: "From the deeps Where discrowned empires o'er their ruins brood, And many a thwarted hope wrings Its weak hands and weeps, I hear a voice as of a mighty wind From all heaven's caverns rushing unconfined: 2S6 COMMENCEMENT DAYS Beware, lest shifting with Time's gradual creep The light that guided shine into your eyes! The envious Powers of ill nor wink, nor sleep; Be therefore timely wise. Nor laugh when this one steals and that one lies, As if your luck could cheat those sleepless spies, Till the deaf Fury comes, your house to sweep." Fellow citizens of the republic of letters, there is surely no need that you, who are familiar with the lessons of history, should be advised how much you ought to love this land of ours, nor what measure of devotion she deserves from those to whom her gifts have been so bountiful, — "She that lifts up the manhood of the poor, She of the open soul and open door, With room about her hearth for all mankind." The sky could hold for us no star of hope that looked down on her desolation; we could not live to behold her promise clouded and her sun going down at noon. Nor will we. It is ours to protect her from the foes that threaten her peace, to give our strength, our love, our life to serve her needs, to trim the torch of truth and hold it high aloft to light her path to peace and freedom. "Souls of her martyrs, draw near; Touch our dull lips with her fire. FORM AND SUBSTANCE 257 That we may praise without fear Her, our delight, our desire, Our hope, our remembrance, our trust, Our present, our past, our to be, Who shall mingle her life with our dust And make us deserve to be free." Printed in the United States of America i 'TpHE following pages contain advertisements of books "■■ by the same author or on kindred subjects. i NEW BOOKS ON RELIGION The Gospel of Good Will as Revealed in Contemporary Christian Scriptures The Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale University for 1916. By WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE, President of Bowdoin College and Author of "The Five Great Philosophies of Life," etc. Cloth, i2mo. This book goes straight to the heart of the Gospel to be preached and practiced — the Gospel that Christ expects men to be great enough to make the good of all affected by their action the object of their wills, as it is the object of the will of God. "The Christian," President Hyde writes, "is not a 'plaster saint' who holds 'safety first' to be the supreme spiritual grace, but the man who earns and spends his money, controls his appetites, chooses peace or war and does whatever his hand finds to do with an eye single to the greatest good of all concerned. Sin is falling short of this high heroic aim. . . . To the Christian every secular vocation is a chance to express Good Will and sacrifice is the price he gladly pays for the privilege. . . . Christian character and Christian virtues will come not by direct cultivation but as by-products of Good Will expressed in daily life. The church is a precious and sacred instrument for transforming men and institutions into sons and servants of Good Will." These extracts indicate in a measure the trend of President Hyde's theme which he has treated fully and in a practical way that will appeal to all thinkers. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York BY THE SAME AUTHOR Live and Learn By Washington Gladden Cloth, i2mo. An exceedingly practical little book is this one in which the distinguished clergyman and writer seeks to impress upon his readers the necessity of getting possession of themselves. Learning how to see, how to think, how to speak, how to hear, how to give, how to serve, how to win and how to wait — these are the author's themes. The chap- ters are interesting because of the happy fashion in which Dr. Gladden clothes his thoughts; they are valuable in that they contain the wise counsel of a mature mind in which are arranged and stored the products of a long experience. The work is especially suited to young people — of the high school age, for example. It will assist them to obtain and maintain a proper adjustment to- ward life. It will, however, be read with no less profit by all whose minds are open, who are willing to learn, whether they be sixteen or sixty. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York NEW BOOKS ON RELIGION Three Religious Leaders of Oxford and Their Movements : John Wycliffe, John Wesley, John Henry Newman By S. PARKES CADMAN Cloth, 8vo. This book deals with three great Englishmen, great Chris- tians, great Churchmen, and loyal sons of Oxford, who, in Dr. Cadman's opinion, are the foremost leaders in religious life and activity that university has yet given to the world. "Many prophets, priests and kings," writes Dr. Cadman, "have been nourished within her borders, but none who in significance and contribution to the general welfare compare with Wycliffe, the real originator of European Protestantism; Wesley, the Anglican priest who became the founder of Methodism and one of the makers of modern England and of English speaking nations; Newman, the spiritual genius of his century, who reinterpreted Catholicism, both Anglican and Roman." Why Men Pray By CHARLES LEWIS SLATTERY Rector of Grace Church, New York City Cloth, T2mo, $.75 Dr. Slattery defines prayer roughly as "talking with the unseen." In his book he does not argue about prayer but rather sets down in as many chapters six convictions which he has concerning it. These convictions are, first, that all men pray; second, that prayer discovers God, that, in other words, when men become conscious of their prayer they find them- selves standing face to face with one whom in a flash they recognize as God; third, prayer unites men; fourth, God de- pends on men's prayer; fifth, prayer submits to the best; and sixth, prayer receives God. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York NEW BOOKS ON RELIGION What Jesus Christ Thought of Himself By ANSON PHELPS STOKES Cloth, i2mo. The purpose of this book is to show in clear, compact form and in untechnical language what any intelligent student of the New Testament may find out for himself as to Jesus's view of his own person. A secondary purpose has been to interpret this self-revealed personality. The author divides his discus- sion into two main parts: The Human Side of Jesus Christ and The Divine Side of Jesus Christ. Under the former he takes up Christ's consciousness of his limitations, his consciousness that he was representing another and his consciousness of his subordination in prayer. Under the latter he considers Christ as Master of the Past, Master of the Present and Master of the Future. The book concludes with a chapter on the rec- onciliation of the human and the divine elements. The Centennial History of the American Bible Society By HENRY OTIS DWIGHT, LL.D. Recording Secretary of the Society In two volumes. Cloth, 8vo The American Bible Society was organized in May, 1816. Its work has been so interwoven with the development of the American republic that there will be felt a very general in- terest in this account of its one hundred years of existence. This has been prepared by the Recording Secretary who, for many months, has been engaged in gathering the necessary data and in writing the narrative. The volume will be found full of information not only as to the history of the society but also as to the results achieved in its distribution of the Scriptures throughout this country and in the far ends of the earth. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York