Chapter 11

No; Mrs. Flutter Budget is not a happy woman; and, as I have intimated before, she seriously interferes with the happiness and the spiritual prosperity of those about her. When she can find nothing to do, then she worries. Those children of hers are worried nearly to death. If, in their play, they get any dirt upon their faces, they are sent immediately to make themselves clean. If they soil their clothes, they are shut up until reduced to a proper state of penitence. They are kept out of all draughts of air for fear of a cold; and if they should take cold, why, they must take medicine of the most repulsive character as a penalty. If they cough out of the wrong corner of their mouths, she suspects them of croupy intentions; and if they venture, at some unguarded moment, on a cutaneous eruption, they are immediately charged with the measles, or accused of small-pox. If they quietly sit down for a moment of repose, she apprehends sickness, and stirs them about to shake it off. Even sleep is not sacred to her, for if she finds a flushed face among the harassed little slumberers, she wakes its owner to make affectionate inquiries. Her husband, as I have already stated, died two years ago. She worked upon his nervous system to such an extent that he was glad to be rid of the world, and of her. I think a man would die, after awhile, with constantly looking at the motion of a saw-mill. The jar of a locomotive makes the toughest iron brittle at last; and the wear and tear of a restless wife are beyond the strongest man's endurance.

I have noticed that persons who have influence upon the minds of others, maintain constantly a degree of repose. I do not mean that those have most influence who use their powers sparingly, but that a certain degree of mental repose--or what may possibly be called imperturbableness--is necessary to influence. Mrs. Flutter Budget always talks in a hurry, and talks of a thousand things, and is easily excited. Her neighbor, carefully avoiding the causes which ruffle her, and preserving the poise of her faculties, insists on her point quietly, and carries it. The repose of equanimity is a charm which dissolves all opposition. The mind which shows itself open to influences from every quarter, and is swayed by them, is not its own master. The mind that never rests is invariably full of freaks and caprices. The mind that has no repose shows its dependence and its lack of self-control. There cannot go out of such a mind as this a positive influence, any more than there can go forth from a candle a steady light, when it stands flickering and flaring in the wind, having all it can do to keep its flame from extinction. There must be that repose of mind which springs from conscious self-control and consciousness of the power of self-control, under all ordinary circumstances, before a man can hope to have influence of a powerful character upon the minds about him. The driver of a coach-and-six, with all the ribbons in his hands, and a thorough knowledge of his horses and his road, sits upon his box in repose; and that repose inspires me with confidence in him; but if he should be constantly on the look-out for some trick, and constantly examining his harnesses, and constantly fussy and uneasy, I should lose my confidence in him, and wish I were in anybody's care but his.

We do not need to be taught that a restless mind is not a reliable mind. There is an instinct which tells us this. There can be no reliableness of character without repose. If I should wish to take a ride, and two horses should be led before me to choose from, I would take the one that stands still, waiting for his burden and his command, rather than the one that occupies the road and his groom with his caracoling and curveting and other signs of restlessness. I should be measurably sure that one would bear me through my journey safely and speedily, and that the other would either throw me, or wear himself out, and so fail of giving me good service. Saint Peter was a restless man--an impatient man. He was always the most impulsive, and the most ready to act, as the servant of the high priest had occasion to remember; but he both lied and denied his Lord. It was John reposing upon the breast of Jesus, who most drew forth the Lord's affection. Martha, worrying about the house, cumbered with much serving, chose a part inferior to that of Mary who reposed at the feet of Jesus. It is only in repose that the powers of the mind are marshalled for great enterprises and for progress. It is in repose, when passion is sleeping and reason is clear-eyed, that the military chieftain marks out his campaign and arranges his forces. He is a poor commander who throws his troops into the field, and fights without order, or struggles for no definite end; and there are multitudes of men who throw themselves into life with an immense splutter, and fight the fight of life with a great deal of noise, but who never make any progress, because they have never drawn upon repose for a plan.

Repose is the cradle of power. It is the fashion to say that great men are men of great passions, as if their passions were the cause rather than the concomitant of their greatness. Great elephants have great legs, but the legs do not make the elephants great. Great legs, however, are required to move great elephants, and wherever we find great elephants, we find great legs. Small men sometimes have great passions, and these passions may so far overcome them that they shall be the weakest of the weak. The possession of great passions is often a disadvantage to weak men and strong men alike, because they furnish so many assailable points for outside forces. A fortress may be very strongly built, but if its doors are open, and scaling ladders are run permanently down from its walls for the accommodation of invading forces, its strength will be of very little practical advantage. Great passions are oftener the weak, than the strong points of great men. Now I do not believe it possible for a man to exercise a high degree of power upon the hearts and minds of others, and, at the same time, be under the influence of any variety of passion. A man cannot be the shivering subject of an outside force, acting upon him through his passions, and at the same time a centre of effluent power. Action and passion are opposed to each other; and when one has possession of the soul the other is wanting. They involve two distinct attitudes of the mind, as truly as do thanksgiving and petition.

The world often finds fault with great men because they are cold; but they could not be great men if they were not cold. A physician is often preferred by a family or patient because he is "so sympathizing," as they call it. They forget that a physician is necessarily untrustworthy in the degree that he is sympathetic with his patients. A physician may be thoroughly kind, and out of his kindness there may grow a gentle manner which seems to spring from sympathy; but I say unhesitatingly that in the degree by which a physician is sympathetic with his patients, is he unfitted for his work. A dentist who feels, in sympathy, the pain that he inflicts upon a child, is unfitted to perform his operation. The surgeon who sensitively sympathizes with a man whose diseased or crushed limb it has fallen to his lot to remove, has lost a portion of his power and skill, and has become a poorer surgeon for his sympathy. Physicians themselves show that they understood this when a case for medical or surgical treatment occurs in their own families. If their wives or their children are sick, they cannot control their sympathies; and the moment they are aware of this, they lose all confidence in themselves. They cannot reduce the fracture of a child's limb, or prescribe for a wife lying dangerously ill, because their sympathies are so greatly excited that their judgment is good for nothing. In other words, they are in an attitude or condition of passion--they are moved and wrought upon by outside forces, to such a degree that they cannot act.

If an orator rise in his place, and show by the agitation of his nerves, his broken sentences, and his choked utterances, that emotion is uppermost in him, he has no more power upon his audience than a baby. We pity his weakness, or we sympathize with him; but he cannot move us. He is a mastered man, and until he can choke down his passion he cannot master us. A man rises in an audience in a state of furious excitement, and fumes, and yells, and gesticulates, but he only moves us to pity, or disgust, or laughter. His passion utterly deprives him of power. We call Mr. Gough an actor, as he undoubtedly is; and we pretend to be disgusted with him for simulating every night, for a hundred nights in succession, the emotions which move us. We forget that if Mr. Gough should really become the subject of the passions which he illustrates, he would lose his power upon us, and kill himself besides. He takes care never to be mastered, and takes care also that all the machinery which he uses shall contribute to his mastery of us. I do not deny that passion may be made tributary to the power of men. Oil is tributary to the power of machinery by lubricating its points of friction; and warmth, by bringing its members into more perfect adjustment; but if the machinery were made to wade in oil, or were heated red hot, oil and heat would be a damage to it.

I repeat the proposition, then, that repose is the cradle of power. The man who cannot hold his passions in repose--in perfect repose--can never employ the measure of his power. These "cold men," as the world calls them, are the men who move and control their race. But it is not necessary to cling to great men for the illustration of my subject. To say that a Christian philanthropist should not be a sympathetic man would be to say that he should not be a man at all; but nothing is more certain than that if a man should surrender himself to his sympathies it would kill him. In a world where sin and its bitter fruits abound as they do in this, where little children cry for bread, and whole races are sunk in barbarism, and villainy preys upon virtue, and the innocent suffer in the place of the guilty, and sickness lays its hand upon multitudes, and pain holds its victims to a life-long bondage, and death leads throngs daily to the grave, and leaves other throngs wild with grief, a sensitively sympathetic man, surrendering himself to all the influences that address him, would lose all power to help the distressed, or even to speak a word of comfort. We are to apprehend the woes of others through our sympathies, and to hold those sympathies in such repose that all the power of our natures will be held ready for, and subject to, intelligent ministry. The woman who faints at the sight of blood is not fit for a hospital. The man who grows pale at hearing a groan, will not do for a surgeon. If we mean to do any thing in this world for the good of men, we must first compel our sympathies and our passions into repose.

That which is true of power in this matter is true of judgment. It is a widely bruited aphorism that "all history is a lie," and this aphorism had its birth in the fact that historians become, as it were, magnetized by the characters with which they deal. A man who writes the life of Napoleon finds himself either sympathizing with him, or roused into antipathy by him. In short, he becomes the subject of a passion, wrought upon him by the character which he contemplates and undertakes to paint; and from the moment this passion takes possession of him, he becomes unfitted to write an impartial and reliable word about him. All positive historical characters have all possible historical portraits, simply because the writers are subjects of passion. It is because no man can write of positive characters without being the subject of an influence from them, that no man can be an impartial historian, and that all history must necessarily be a lie. If ever a perfect history shall be written, it will be written by one whose passions are under entire control, and kept in a condition of profound repose--who will look at a historical character as he would upon an impaled beetle in an entomological collection. A man is no competent judge of a character, either in history or in life, with which he strongly sympathizes. I have known many a man utterly unfitted to read the proofs of the villainy of one to whom he had surrendered his sympathies. A woman in love is a very poor judge of character. She can see nothing but excellence where others see nothing but shallowness and rottenness.

Once more, there is no dignity without repose. A restless, uneasy man, can never be a dignified man. There can be no dignity about a man or a woman who fumes, and frets, and fusses, and is full of freaks and caprices. Dignity of manners is always associated with repose. Mrs. Flutter Budget always enters a drawing-room as if she were a loaded doll, tossed in by the usher, and goes dodging and tipping about to get her centre of gravity, without getting it. Her queenly neighbor comes in as the sun rises--calmly, sweetly, steadily, and all hearts bow to her dignified coming. What would an Archbishop be worth for dignity, who should be continually scratching his ears, and brushing his nose, and crossing and re-crossing his legs, and drumming with his fingers? Who would not deem the ermine degraded by a chief justice who should be constantly twitching about upon his bench? It is a fact that has come under the observation of the least observant, that the moment a man surrenders himself to his passions he loses his dignity. A fit of anger is as fatal to dignity as a dose of arsenic to life. A fit of mirthfulness is hardly less fatal. So it is in repose, and particularly in the repose of the passions, that we find the happiness, the influence, the power, and the dignity of our life. Let us cultivate repose.

LESSON XIV.

THE WAYS OF CHARITY.

"The Holy Supper is kept indeed, In whatso we share with another's need; Not that which we give, but what we share. For the gift without the giver is bare: Who bestows himself, with his alms feeds three,-- Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me." LOWELL.

"It may not be our lot to wield The sickle in the ripened field; Nor ours to hear on summer eves, The reaper's song among the sheaves; Yet, when our duty's task is wrought, In unison with God's great thought, The near and future blend in one, And whatsoe'er is willed is done." WHITTIER.

I have come to entertain very serious doubts about my "orthodoxy" on the subject of doing good. If I know my own motives, I certainly have a desire to do good; but this desire is yoke fellow with the perverse wish to do it in my own way. I do not feel myself inclined to accept the prescriptions of those who have taken out patents for various ingenious processes in this line of effort. My attention has just been attracted to this subject, by the perusal of a long story, which must be not far from the one hundred and ninety-ninth that I have read during the past twenty years, all tipped with the same general moral. A good-natured lady, in easy circumstances, and of benevolent impulses, is appealed to by a poor man in the kitchen. She feeds him, gives him clothes, sends him away rejoicing, and feels good over it. The man comes again and again, tells pitiful stories, excites her benevolence of course, and secures a reasonable amount of additional plunder. Months pass away; and being out upon a walk one pleasant afternoon, and finding herself near the poor man's residence, the fair benefactress calls upon him. She finds the wife (who was reported dead) very comfortable indeed, and the destitute family of four children reduced to a single fat and saucy baby, and the poor liar himself smelling strongly of rum. Then come the denouement, and a grand tableau: lady very much grieved and astonished--wife, who has known nothing of her husband's tricks, exceedingly bewildered--fuddled husband, blind with rum and remorse, owns up to his meanness and duplicity. He found (as he confessed) that he could work upon the lady's sympathies, got to lying and couldn't stop, and, finally, felt so badly over the whole operation, that he took to drink to drown his conscience! _Moral:_ Women should not help poor people without going to see them, and finding out whether they lie.

Now that woman did exactly as I should have done, under the same circumstances. In the first place, I should never have had the heart to doubt a man who carried an honest face, and was cold, hungry, and ragged. I should have regarded his condition as a claim upon my charity. In the second place, I should have had no time to call upon his family, and satisfy myself with regard to their circumstances; and in the third place, I should have felt very delicate about putting direct questions to them if I had. The same story tells incidentally of one of these men who do good in the proper way. He visited a house which presented all the signs of poverty; but the angel of mercy was too 'cute' to be taken in; so he walked up stairs. Every thing presenting there the same aspect of abject poverty that prevailed below, the angel of mercy looked around him, and discovered a ladder leading to the garret. The angel of mercy "smelt a rat," and mounted the ladder. In the garret he found half a cord of wood, and any quantity of goodies for the table. Another denouement and tableau. _Moral:_ as before. If the story has taught me any thing, it is that it is my duty to question every beggar that comes to my door, visit his house, explore it from cellar to garret, and satisfy myself of the truth or falsehood of his representations. Otherwise, my charity goes for nothing, and I do my beggar an absolute unkindness. In other words, while the law holds every man innocent until he is proved to be guilty, charity holds every man guilty until he is proved to be innocent.

It has become the fashion in certain circles to decry that benevolence which sits at home in slippers, and gives its money without seeing where it goes; but it is forgotten that the money dispensed in slippers was earned in boots, and that the man who has money to give, has usually so much business on hand that he can make no adequate personal examination of the cases which are referred to his charity. I can never forget Mr. Dickens' Cheeryble Brothers, who were so very much obliged to a friend for calling upon them, and telling them of the circumstances of a poor family. It was taken as a great personal kindness when they were informed how and where they could relieve want and distress. They had no genius for going about and looking up cases of charity, but their hearts leaped at the opportunity to do good. They did their work in their counting-room, and had no time and no talent for visiting those whom they benefited; but who would question either the genuineness or the judiciousness of their benevolence? The applications for aid made at the doors of our dwellings come oftener to the mistresses of those dwellings than to the masters; and these mistresses, four times in five, are women with the care of children on their hands, or household duties which demand almost constant attention. If a beggar come to the door, they are grateful for the opportunity to afford relief; but they have no time to visit another quarter of the town, to learn whether their charities have been well bestowed, nor do they withhold their charities through fear of being imposed upon.

In my judgment, the character and circumstances of a man determine his office in the work of charitable relief. I know there are some persons who have a peculiar natural adaptation to the work of visiting the subjects of sickness and of need. Their presence and their sympathy are grateful to those to whom they delight to minister. They are masters and mistresses of all those thrifty economies which enable them to manage for the poor. They have genuine administrative talent in this particular department. They are cheerful and active, and sympathetic and ingenious; and they can do more for a poor, discouraged family with ten dollars than others can do with fifty. I do not suppose that these people are one whit more benevolent than those whose purses are always open to the poor, and who at the same time would feel very awkward upon a visit of charity, and would make the family visited feel as awkward as themselves. The poor we have always with us; and every man and woman who possesses means for their relief owes a duty to them which is to be discharged in the most efficient way. If I have money, and do not feel that I am the proper person to look after the details of its dispensation, I will put it into the hands of one more competent to the business, and I will rationally conclude that I have done my duty. In the mean time, if a man come to my door, and ask for the supply of his immediate necessities, he shall not be turned empty away because I do not happen to have the means at hand for verifying his story.

I know that there are multitudes of tender-hearted women--women of abounding benevolence and sensitive conscience--who are troubled upon this subject. They have a desire to do good, and to do it in the right way; but, somehow, they find if impossible to do it according to the views of the story-writers. They are any thing but rugged in health, perhaps, or they have a dependent family of young children around them, or the care of their dwellings absorbs their time. They fail to find the opportunity to visit the poor, or they do not feel themselves adapted to the office; and still they carry about with them the uncomfortable suspicion that they are meanly shrinking from duty. My thought upon this point is that my duties never conflict with one another, and that if I can do good in one way better than another, then that is my way to do good. I shall not permit the story-writers to prescribe for me, nor shall I allow them to make me uncomfortable.

There is a class of men and women in all Protestant communities who think it a very neat thing to do good at random. They sow broadcast of cheap seed, content to reap nothing at all, and pleasantly disappointed if they find here and there a stalk of corn to reward their sowing. They do not prepare their ground, they do not cultivate it at all, but they sow, hoping that in some open place a seed may fall and germinate. Some of these people regard this method of doing good as a kind of holy stratagem--a Christian trick--which takes the devil at a disadvantage. I once knew a kind old gentleman who did a business that brought him considerably into contact with rough and profane persons; and as he wished to do something for them, he kept his pockets filled with little printed cards entitled "The Swearer's Prayer;" and whenever an oath came out, the utterer was immediately presented with this card with a little story on it, and a statement that "to swear is neither brave, polite, nor wise." I very well remember hearing the old gentleman say that, though he had given away hundreds of these cards, he had never learned that one of them had done any good. I do not wonder at it. It was a sneaking way of doing good, or of trying to. If the old man had remonstrated personally with these swearing fellows, and told them that their habit was both vulgar and wicked, does any one suppose that the result would have been so unsatisfactory? He had not pluck enough to do this; so he gave them a card, and they either threw it in his face or threw it away. But then, the cards didn't cost much!