Chapter 4

It would appear, therefore, that there is no way by which we can surround ourselves by good society so readily as by being good ourselves. If we plant good seed, we may calculate with a great degree of certainty upon securing good fruit. If I plant frankness and open-heartedness, I expect to reap them; and I have no right to expect to reap them unless I plant them. If I go to a man with my heart in my hand, I have good reason for expecting to meet a man with his heart in his hand. Frankness begets frankness, just as naturally and just as certainly, under the proper conditions, as like produces like in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. There are men who do every thing by indirection who meet one as warily as if words were traps; and pitfalls who manage a friendly interview as a general would manage a campaign; and if they make their demonstration first, we are placed upon our guard. We unconsciously become wary and distrustful. They plant distrust and secretiveness, and they produce in us after their kind. No man can be treated frankly in this world unless he himself be frank. If we would win confidence to ourselves, we must put confidence in others. The soul is like a mirror, reflecting that which stands before it.

The young naturally take on the moods and accept and reflect the influences around them more readily than the old, just as a new piece of land will produce a better crop than one which is worn or pre-occupied. A virgin mind is like a virgin soil. It contains all the elements of fertility, and is adapted to the production of any crop. It has been exhausted in no department of its constitution. It is not occupied by roots, and shaded by foliage. It is not turf-bound and dry; but it is soft and open, and clean and moist, and ready for the reception of any seed that may fall upon it. Until age brings individuality, the mind seems to have little choice as to what it will receive. Then, indeed, it does reject much seed that falls upon it, and much fails to take root because of the pre-occupation of the surface. A sensual seed is planted in the soul of a young man, and it springs up readily, and produces after its kind; but the same seed tossed upon an older soil fails to sink and germinate, because the surface is pre-occupied, or, more frequently, because that peculiar element on which the germ must rely for quickening and sustentation has been exhausted. Some manly or Christian grace falls upon a young mind, and quickly strikes root and rises into flower and fruit; while the same grace thrown upon an adult mind would fail to reach the soil, through the vices that cumber and choke it. It is thus that home and the school-room are literally seminaries--places where seed is sown-- and it is in these that we expect and intend that every seed shall produce after its kind. Let us talk about this a little.

I once heard a person say that one of his acquaintances, whom he named, had no moral right to have a child. Why was this harsh judgment uttered? Because he was hereditarily scrofulous, and would necessarily entail upon his offspring the family taint. If there were even a show of justice in this, what must be said of a parent who does not possess a single moral quality, that even he, in the selfishness of his parental love, would desire to see implanted in his child? How many homes are scattered over Christendom in which no good seed is sown! How many selfish, niggardly, vicious parents are there, who, producing after their kind, by generation and by influence, are filling the world with selfish, niggardly, and vicious children! How many homes are there in which the gentle words of love are never heard; in which the tender graces of a Christian heart are never unfolded; in which a prayer is never uttered! How many fathers are there whose lips are black with profanity and foul with obscenity, and whose lives are mean and unwholesome! How many mothers are there whose tongues are nimble with scandal and bitter with scolding, and whose brains are busy with vanities and jealousies! Ah! if there be any man or woman in this world who has no moral right to have a child, it is one who has not a single trait of character desirable to be reproduced in a child. Scrofula may be bad, but sin is worse. Bodily taint may be terrible, but spiritual taint is horrible.

It is a general truth, under the law that every thing produces after its kind, that children become what their parents are. A simple people, virtuous and healthy, will produce virtuous, healthy, and true-hearted children, A luxurious people--lazy, sensual, wasteful--will produce children like themselves. If we go through the vicious quarters of a great city, where licentiousness and drunkenness and beastly vices prevail, we shall find that though all die before old age, the communities are abundantly recruited by the children which they produce. Men, principles, habits, ideas, vices, all have children, whose features betray their parentage; so that no parent has a right to expect a child to be better than its father and mother. On the contrary, he has every reason to believe that every thing that a child sees wrong in the parents, will be imitated. There is no way by which bad parents can bring up a family well. There must be in the parental life good principles, a sweet and equable temper, a tender and loving disposition, a firm self-control, a pleasant deportment, and a conscientious devotion to duty, or these will not be found in the life of the children. Bad seed, sown in the quick soil of a child's mind, is sure to spring up, and to bear fruit after its kind. No sensible man ever dreams of gathering figs from thistles, or grapes from bramble-bushes, and no man has the slightest right to suppose that he can bring up a family to be better than he is. The plant will be true to the seed.

We are in the habit of hearing that the children of a certain neighborhood, or school, or town, are extraordinarily bad children. Great wonder is sometimes expressed in regard to such instances, when, really, they are not wonderful at all. When children are unusually bad, parents are unusually bad, or, if they are not bad-hearted, they are wrong-headed. I ought, perhaps, to say here that I have known an irascible, tyrannical, unjust and cruel school-teacher to spoil a neighborhood of children, when the parents were without any special fault, save that of failing to thrust him out of the charge which he had abused. But usually the fault is at home. If the seed planted there be good, it will produce good fruit. Yet my reader will say that the best man he ever knew, had the worst children he ever saw. The truth of the statement is admitted, but what do you know of the home life of that family? How much unreasonable restraint has been exercised upon those children? From how many exhibitions of stern and unrelenting injustice have these children suffered? What laxity of discipline and carelessness of culture have reigned in that family? I know many who seem to be excellent men in society, but who are any thing but amiable men at home. In one they are pleasant, affable, kind, and charitable; in the other, cross-grained, hard, unkind, and unjust. I declare with all positiveness, that when a family or a neighborhood of children is bad, there is a reason for it outside of the children. There are bad influences which descend upon them, and work out their natural results in them.

It is astonishing to see how long a seed will lie in the ground without germinating, and how true it will remain to its kind through untold years. Cut down a pine forest, where an oak has not been seen for a century, and oak shrubbery will spring up. Heave out upon the surface a pile of earth that has lain hidden from the eyes of a dozen generations, and forthwith it will grow green with weeds. Plough up the prairie, and turn under the grass and flowers that have grown there since the white settler can remember, and there will spring from the inverted sod a strange growth that has had no representative in the sunlight for long ages. Soul and soil are alike in this. I once heard a man say of his father, who had been dead many years--"I hate him: I hate his memory." The words were spoken bitterly, with a flushed face and angry eyes, yet he who spoke them was one of the kindest and most placable of men. Deep down in his heart, under love for his mother which was almost worship, and under affection for wife, children, and sisters which was as deep as his nature, and under multiplied friendships, there had been planted this seed. The father had treated the boy harshly and unjustly; and the young soul was stung as the tender fruit is stung by an insect. Where anger and resentment were sown, anger and resentment were ready to spring up the moment the seed was uncovered. I have known men to carry through life a revenge planted in their hearts by some unjust and cruel schoolmaster. How many men are there are in the world who have sworn to revenge themselves upon one who had stung them with anger or injustice when in childhood!

So we come to the grand lesson, that if we would have good children, we must ourselves be exactly what we would have them become; if we would govern our families, we must first govern ourselves; if we would have only pleasant words greet our ears in the home circle, we must speak only pleasant words. We should see to it that we plant nothing, the legitimate fruits of which we shall not be willing and glad to see borne in the lives of our children. If our children are bad, the fault is, ninety-nine cases in a hundred, our own, in some way. If we would reform society, or make it better in any respect, our quickest way to do it is to reform and make ourselves better. If I would reap courtesy and hospitality and kindness and love, I must plant them; and it is the sum of all arrogance to assume that I have a right to reap them without planting them. A man who receives courtesy without exercising it, reaps that which he has not sown. He is a thief, and ought in justice to be kicked out of society. Blessings on the man who sows the seeds of a happy nature and a noble character broadcast wherever his feet wander,--who has a smile alike for joy and sorrow, a tender word always for a child, a compassionate utterance for suffering, courtesy for friends and for strangers, encouragement for the despairing, an open heart for all--love for all--good words for all! Such seed produces after its kind in all soils, when it finds lodgment; and that which the sower fails to reap, passes into hands that are grateful for the largess.

LESSON V.

TRUTH AND TRUTHFULNESS.

"For truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as a sunbeam." MILTON.

"Odds life! must one swear to the truth of a song?" MATTHEW PRIOR.

"Get but the truth once uttered, and 'tis like A star new-born that drops into its place, And which, once circling in its placid round, Not all the tumult of the earth can shake." LOWELL.

One of the rarest powers possessed by man is the power to state a fact. It seems a very simple thing to tell the truth, but, beyond all question, there is nothing half so easy as lying. To comprehend a fact in its exact length, breadth, relations, and significance, and to state it in language that shall represent it with exact fidelity, are the work of a mind singularly gifted, finely balanced, and thoroughly practiced in that special department of effort. The greatness of Daniel Webster was more apparent in his power to state a fact, or to present a truth, than in any other characteristic of his gigantic nature. It was the power of truth that won for him his forensic victories. Whenever he was truest to truth, then was truth truest to him. He was a man who implicitly believed in the power of truth to take care of itself when it had been fairly presented; and the failures of his life always grew out of his attempts to make falsehood look like truth--a field of effort in which the most gifted of his cotemporaries won the most brilliant of his triumphs.

The men are comparatively few who are in the habit of telling the truth. We all lie, every day of our lives--almost in every sentence we utter--not consciously and criminally, perhaps, but really, in that our language fails to represent truth, and state facts correctly. Our truths are half-truths, or distorted truths, or exaggerated truths, or sophisticated truths. Much of this is owing to carelessness, much to habit, and, more than has generally been supposed, to mental incapacity. I have known eminent men who had not the power to state a fact, in its whole volume and outline, because, first, they could not comprehend it perfectly, and, second, because their power of expression was limited. The lenses by which they apprehended their facts were not adjusted properly, so they saw every thing with a blur. Definite outlines, cleanly cut edges, exact apprehension of volume and weight, nice measurement of relations, were matters outside of their observation and experience. They had broad minds, but bungling; and their language was no better than their apprehensions--usually it was worse, because language is rarely as definite as apprehension. Men rarely do their work to suit them, because their tools are imperfect.

There are men in all communities who are believed to be honest, yet whose word is never taken as authority upon any subject. There is a flaw or a warp somewhere in their perceptions, which prevents them from receiving truthful impressions. Every thing comes to them distorted, as natural objects are distorted by reaching the eye through wrinkled window-glass. Some are able to apprehend a fact and state it correctly, if it have no direct relation to themselves; but the moment their personality, or their personal interest, is involved, the fact assumes false proportions and false colors. I know a physician whose patients are always alarmingly sick when he is first called to them. As they usually get well, I am bound to believe that he is a good physician; but I am not bound to believe that they are all as sick at beginning as he supposes them to be. The first violent symptoms operate upon his imagination and excite his fears, and his opinion as to the degree of danger attaching to the diseases of his patients is not worth half so much as that of any sensible old nurse. In fact, nobody thinks of taking it all; and those who know him, and who hear his sad representations of the condition of his patients, show equal distrust of his word and faith in his skill, by taking it for granted that they are in a fair way to get well.

It is impossible for bigots, for men of one idea, for fanatics, for those who set boundaries to themselves in religious, social, and political creeds, for men who think more of their own selfish interests than they do of truth, and for vicious men, to speak the truth. We are all, I suppose, bigots to a greater or less extent. We all have a creed written in our minds, or printed in our books; and to this we are more or less blindly attached. We set down an article of faith, or adopt an opinion, and nothing is allowed to interfere with it. If a sturdy fact comes along, and asks admission, we turn to our creed to see if we can safely entertain it. If the creed says "No," we say "No," and the fact is turned out of doors, and misrepresented after it is gone. Our creeds are our dwellings. They come next to us, and nothing can come to us, or go out from us, without going through our creeds. The simple fact of the death of Jesus Christ upon the cross, reaching the mind through various creeds, and passing out again, goes through as many phases as there are creeds, ranging through a scale which at one extreme presents a God dying to redeem the lost millions of a world, and, at the other, a benevolent, sweet-tempered man, yielding his life in testimony of the honesty of his teachings.

No new truth presents itself, which does not have to run the gauntlet of our creeds. If it get through alive, and seem disposed to be peaceable, and to remain subordinate to them, then we let it live, and receive it into respectable society;--otherwise, we entreat it shamefully. Sometimes the truth is too much for us, and asserts its power to stand without our help, and then we compromise with it. The world will turn on its axis, and wheel around its orbit, though we stop the mouth of the profane wretch who declares it; so, after a while, we get tired of fighting the fact, and shape our creeds accordingly. We fight the sturdy truths of geology, because they interfere with our creeds, but after awhile the sturdy truths of geology become too sturdy for us, and then we begin to patronize them, and to confer upon them the honor of harmonizing with our creeds. A man who has adopted the creed of a materialist, is entirely incompetent to receive, entertain, and represent a spiritual fact. My creed is the window at which I sit, and look at all the world of truth outside of me. All truth is tinted by the medium through which it passes to reach my mind; and such is my imperfection and my weakness, that I could not raise my window immediately, and place my soul in direct, vital contact with the great atmosphere of truth, if I would.

But if bigotry be such a bar to the correct perception of truth, what shall be said of self-interest and personal vices of appetite and passion? It is possible for no man who owns a slave and finds profit in such ownership, to receive the truth touching the right of man to himself, and the moral wrong of slavery. We have too much evidence that even creeds must bend to self-interest, and that any traffic will be regarded as morally right which is pecuniarily profitable. Once, in the creed of the slaveholders, slavery was admitted to be wrong, but that was when it was looked upon as temporary in its character, and, on the whole, evil in its results to all concerned. Now, when it is sought to be made a permanent institution, because it seems to be the only source of the wealth of a section, it has become right; and even the slave-trade logically falls into the category of laudable and legitimate commerce. It is impossible for a people who have allowed pecuniary interest to deprave their moral sense to this extent, to perceive and receive any sound political truth, or to apprehend the spirit and temper of those who are opposed to them. The same may be said of the liquor traffic. The act of selling liquor is looked upon with horror by those who stand outside, and who have an eye upon its consequences; but the seller deems it legitimate, and looks upon any interference with his sales as an infringement of his rights. Our selfish interest in any business, or in any scheme of profit, distorts all truth either directly or indirectly related to such business or scheme, or living in its region and atmosphere. The President of the United States, or the governor of the commonwealth, may be an excellent man; but if I want an office, and he fails to appoint me to it, why I don't exactly regard him as such. He becomes to me a very ordinary and vulgar sort of man indeed; but if he give me my office, then, though he may be all that his enemies think him, he seems to me to be invested with a singular nobility of character that other people do not apprehend at all.

The vices of humanity are sad media through which to receive truth--often so opaque that no truth can reach the mind at all. It is impossible for a man whose affections are bestialized, whose practices are libertine, and whose imaginations are all impure, to receive the truth that there are such things as purity and virtue, and that there are men and women around him who are virtuous and pure. There is no truth which personal vice will not distort. The approaches to a sensual mind are through the senses, and the same may be said of all minds in a general way; but the approaches to a sensual mind are only through the senses, and they, being perverted, abused, exhausted, or unduly excited, furnish the utterly unreliable avenues by which truth reaches the soul. The grand reason why truth, published from the pulpit and the platform, revealed in periodicals and books, and embodied in pictures and statues, works no greater changes upon the minds and morals of men, is, that it never gets inside of men in the shape in which it is uttered. It passes through such media of bigotry, or self-interest, or vice, that its identity and power are lost.

It is not, therefore, remarkable that so little truth is told when so little is received--that so little is expressed when so little is apprehended. The largest field will not produce an oat-straw that will stand alone, if there be no silica in the soil, and the largest mind cannot express a pure truth if it has lived always so encased that pure truth could not find its way into it. All truth reaches our minds through various media, by which it is more or less colored and refracted; and it is very rare that a man has the power to embody in language and utter a truth in the degree of perfection in which he received it. As I said at beginning, the power to state a fact correctly, or to express a pure truth, is among the rarest gifts of man. It never struck me that David was remarkably hasty, when he said that all men were liars. All men are liars, in one respect or another. They are divisible into various classes, which may legitimately be mentioned under two heads, viz., unconscious liars and conscious liars.

Of those who lie, and suppose they are telling the truth, I have already spoken. They are a large and most respectable class of people, and their apology must be found in the theory I have advanced; yet among these may be found men and women who will require all the amplitude of our mantles of charity to cover them. I have been much impressed with a passage in Dr. Bushnell's recent volume, entitled "Christian Nurture," which incidentally touches upon this subject, in the writer's characteristically powerful way; and as I cannot condense it, I will copy it:

"There is, in some persons who appear in all other respects to be Christian, a strange defect of truth, or truthfulness. They are not conscious of it. They would take it as a cruel injustice were they only to suspect their acquaintances of holding such an estimate of them. And yet, there is a want of truth in every sort of demonstration they make. It is not their words only that lie, but their voice, air, action; their every putting forth has a lying character. The atmosphere they live in is an atmosphere of pretence. Their virtues are affectations. Their compassions and sympathies are the airs they put on. Their friendship is their mood, and nothing more; and yet they do not know it. They mean, it may be, no fraud. They only cheat themselves so effectually as to believe that what they are only acting is their truth. And, what is difficult to reconcile, they have a great many Christian sentiments; they maintain prayer as a habit, and will sometimes speak intelligently of matters of Christian experience."

It was the oracular sage, Deacon Bedott, who, in view of the imperfections of his kind, remarked several times in his life: "we are all poor creeturs"--a remark that comes as near to being pure truth as any we meet with outside of the Bible and the standard treatises on mathematics. We are, indeed, poor creatures. Our highest conceptions of truth are contemptible, our best utterances fall short of our conceptions, and our lives are poorer than our language.