Part 1

Chapter 14,004 wordsPublic domain

SELF-CONTROL ITS KINGSHIP AND MAJESTY

WILLIAM GEORGE JORDAN

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

CHICAGO LONDON TORONTO NEW YORK EDINBURGH

Republished from the _Saturday Evening Post_ through the courtesy of the Curtis Publishing Company,

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street

* * * * *

CONTENTS

PAGE

_I._ _The Kingship of Self-Control_ 7

_II._ _The Crimes of the Tongue_ 18

_III._ _The Red Tape of Duty_ 28

_IV._ _The Supreme Charity of the World_ 38

_V._ _Worry, the Great American Disease_ 49

_VI._ _The Greatness of Simplicity_ 60

_VII._ _Living life Over Again_ 71

_VIII._ _Syndicating our Sorrows_ 82

_IX._ _The Revelations of Reserve Power_ 93

_X._ _The Majesty of Calmness_ 104

_XI._ _Hurry, the Scourge of America_ 113

_XII._ _The Power of Personal Influence_ 124

_XIII._ _The Dignity of Self-Reliance_ 135

_XIV._ _Failure as a Success _ 147

_XV._ _Doing Our Best at All Times_ 161

_XVI._ _The Royal Road to Happiness_ 178

* * * * *

_Self-Control_

The Kingship _of_ Self-Control

Man has two creators,—his God and himself. His first creator furnishes him the raw material of his life and the laws in conformity with which he can make that life what he will. His second creator,—himself,—has marvellous powers he rarely realizes. It is what a man makes of himself that counts.

When a man fails in life he usually says, “I am as God made me.” When he succeeds he proudly proclaims himself a “self-made man.” Man is placed into this world not as a finality,—but as a possibility. Man’s greatest enemy is,—himself. Man in his weakness is the creature of circumstances; man in his strength is the creator of circumstances. Whether he be victim or victor depends largely on himself.

Man is never truly great merely for what he _is_, but ever for what he may become. Until man be truly filled with the knowledge of the majesty of his possibility, until there come to him the glow of realization of his privilege to live the life committed to him, as an individual life for which he is individually responsible, he is merely groping through the years.

To see his life as he might make it, man must go up alone into the mountains of spiritual thought as Christ went alone into the Garden, leaving the world to get strength to live in the world. He must there breathe the fresh, pure air of recognition of his divine importance as an individual, and with mind purified and tingling with new strength he must approach the problems of his daily living.

Man needs less of the “I am a feeble worm of the dust” idea in his theology, and more of the conception “I am a great human soul with marvellous possibilities” as a vital element in his daily working religion. With this broadening, stimulating view of life, he sees how he may attain his kingship through self-control. And the self-control that is seen in the most spectacular instances in history, and in the simplest phases of daily life, is precisely the same in kind and in quality, differing only in degree. This control man can attain, if he only will; it is but a matter of paying the price.

The power of self-control is one of the great qualities that differentiates man from the lower animals. He is the only animal capable of a moral struggle or a moral conquest.

Every step in the progress of the world has been a new “control.” It has been escaping from the tyranny of a fact, to the understanding and mastery of that fact. For ages man looked in terror at the lightning flash; to-day he has begun to understand it as electricity, a force he has mastered and made his slave. The million phases of electrical invention are but manifestations of our control over a great force. But the greatest of all “control” is self-control.

At each moment of man’s life he is either a King or a slave. As he surrenders to a wrong appetite, to any human weakness; as he falls prostrate in hopeless subjection to any condition, to any environment, to any failure, he is a slave. As he day by day crushes out human weakness, masters opposing elements within him, and day by day re-creates a new self from the sin and folly of his past,—then he is a King. He is a King ruling with wisdom over himself. Alexander conquered the whole world except,—Alexander. Emperor of the earth, he was the servile slave of his own passions.

We look with envy upon the possessions of others and wish they were our own. Sometimes we feel this in a vague, dreamy way with no thought of real attainment, as when we wish we had Queen Victoria’s crown, or Emperor William’s self-satisfaction. Sometimes, however, we grow bitter, storm at the wrong distribution of the good things of life, and then relapse into a hopeless fatalistic acceptance of our condition.

We envy the success of others, when we should emulate the process by which that success came. We see the splendid physical development of Sandow, yet we forget that as a babe and child he was so weak there was little hope that his life might be spared.

We may sometimes envy the power and spiritual strength of a Paul, without realizing the weak Saul of Tarsus from which he was transformed through his self-control.

We shut our eyes to the thousands of instances of the world’s successes,—mental, moral, physical, financial or spiritual,—wherein the great final success came from a beginning far weaker and poorer than our own.

Any man may attain self-control if he only will. He must not expect to gain it save by long continued payment of price, in small progressive expenditures of energy. Nature is a thorough believer in the installment plan in her relations with the individual. No man is so poor that he cannot _begin_ to pay for what he wants, and every small, individual payment that he makes, Nature stores and accumulates for him as a reserve fund in his hour of need.

The patience man expends in bearing the little trials of his daily life Nature stores for him as a wondrous reserve in a crisis of life. With Nature, the mental, the physical or the moral energy he expends daily in right-doing is all stored for him and transmuted into strength. Nature never accepts a cash payment in full for anything,—this would be an injustice to the poor and to the weak.

It is only the progressive installment plan Nature recognizes. No man can make a habit in a moment or break it in a moment. It is a matter of development, of growth. But at any moment man may _begin_ to make or begin to break any habit. This view of the growth of character should be a mighty stimulus to the man who sincerely desires and determines to live nearer to the limit of his possibilities.

Self-control may be developed in precisely the same manner as we tone up a weak muscle,—by little exercises day by day. Let us each day do, as mere exercises of discipline in moral gymnastics, a few acts that are disagreeable to us, the doing of which will help us in instant action in our hour of need. The exercises may be very simple—dropping for a time an intensely interesting book at the most thrilling page of the story; jumping out of bed at the first moment of waking; walking home when one is perfectly able to do so, but when the temptation is to take a car; talking to some disagreeable person and trying to make the conversation pleasant. These daily exercises in moral discipline will have a wondrous tonic effect on man’s whole moral nature.

The individual can attain self-control in great things only through self-control in little things. He must study himself to discover what is the weak point in his armor, what is the element within him that ever keeps him from his fullest success. This is the characteristic upon which he should begin his exercise in self-control. Is it selfishness, vanity, cowardice, morbidness, temper, laziness, worry, mind-wandering, lack of purpose?—whatever form human weakness assumes in the masquerade of life he must discover. He must then live each day as if his whole existence were telescoped down to the single day before him. With no useless regret for the past, no useless worry for the future, he should live that day as if it were his only day,—the only day left for him to assert all that is best in him, the only day left for him to conquer all that is worst in him. He should master the weak element within him at each slight manifestation from moment to moment. Each moment then must be a victory for it or for him. Will he be King, or will he be slave?—the answer rests with him.

The Crimes _of the_ Tongue

The second most deadly instrument of destruction is the dynamite gun,—the first is the human tongue. The gun merely kills bodies; the tongue kills reputations and, ofttimes, ruins characters. Each gun works alone; each loaded tongue has a hundred accomplices. The havoc of the gun is visible at once. The full evil of the tongue lives through all the years; even the eye of Omniscience might grow tired in tracing it to its finality.

The crimes of the tongue are words of unkindness, of anger, of malice, of envy, of bitterness, of harsh criticism, gossip, lying and scandal. Theft and murder are awful crimes, yet in any single year the aggregate sorrow, pain and suffering they cause in a nation is microscopic when compared with the sorrows that come from the crimes of the tongue. Place in one of the scale-pans of Justice the evils resulting from the acts of criminals, and in the other the grief and tears and suffering resulting from the crimes of respectability, and you will start back in amazement as you see the scale you thought the heavier shoot high in air.

At the hands of thief or murderer few of us suffer, even indirectly. But from the careless tongue of friend, the cruel tongue of enemy, who is free? No human being can live a life so true, so fair, so pure as to be beyond the reach of malice, or immune from the poisonous emanations of envy. The insidious attacks against one’s reputation, the loathsome innuendoes, slurs, half-lies, by which jealous mediocrity seeks to ruin its superiors, are like those insect parasites that kill the heart and life of a mighty oak. So cowardly is the method, so stealthy the shooting of the poisoned thorns, so insignificant the separate acts in their seeming, that one is not on guard against them. It is easier to dodge an elephant than a microbe.

In London they have recently formed an Anti-Scandal League. The members promise to combat in every way in their power “the prevalent custom of talking scandal, the terrible and unending consequences of which are not generally estimated.”

Scandal is one of the crimes of the tongue, but it is only one. Every individual who breathes a word of scandal is an active stockholder in a society for the spread of moral contagion. He is instantly punished by Nature by having his mental eyes dimmed to sweetness and purity, and his mind deadened to the sunlight and glow of charity. There is developed a wondrous, ingenious perversion of mental vision, by which every act of others is explained and interpreted from the lowest possible motives. They become like certain carrion flies, that pass lightly over acres of rose-gardens, to feast on a piece of putrid meat. They have developed a keen scent for the foul matter upon which they feed.

There are pillows wet by sobs; there are noble hearts broken in the silence whence comes no cry of protest; there are gentle, sensitive natures seared and warped; there are old-time friends separated and walking their lonely ways with hope dead and memory but a pang; there are cruel misunderstandings that make all life look dark,—these are but a few of the sorrows that come from the crimes of the tongue.

A man may lead a life of honesty and purity, battling bravely for all he holds dearest, so firm and sure of the rightness of his life that he never thinks for an instant of the diabolic ingenuity that makes evil and evil report where naught but good really exists. A few words lightly spoken by the tongue of slander, a significant expression of the eyes, a cruel shrug of the shoulders, with a pursing of the lips,—and then, friendly hands grow cold, the accustomed smile is displaced by a sneer, and one stands alone and aloof with a dazed feeling of wonder at the vague, intangible something that has caused it all.

For this craze for scandal, sensational newspapers of to-day are largely responsible. Each newspaper is not one tongue, but a thousand or a million tongues, telling the same foul story to as many pairs of listening ears. The vultures of sensationalism scent the carcass of immorality afar off. From the uttermost parts of the earth they collect the sin, disgrace and folly of humanity, and show them bare to the world. They do not even require _facts_, for morbid memories and fertile imaginations make even the worst of the world’s happenings seem tame when compared with their monstrosities of invention. These stories, and the discussions they excite, develop in readers a cheap, shrewd power of distortion of the acts of all around them.

If a rich man give a donation to some charity, they say: “He is doing it to get his name talked about,—to help his business.” If he give it anonymously, they say, “Oh, it’s some millionaire who is clever enough to know that refraining from giving his name will pique curiosity; he will see that the public is informed later.” If he do not give to charity, they say: “Oh, he’s stingy with his money, of course, like the rest of the millionaires.” To the vile tongue of gossip and slander, Virtue is ever deemed but a mask, noble ideals but a pretense, generosity a bribe.

The man who stands above his fellows must expect to be the target for the envious arrows of their inferiority. It is part of the price he must pay for his advance. One of the most detestable characters in all literature is Iago.

Envious of the promotion of Cassio above his head, he hated Othello. His was one of those low natures that become absorbed in sustaining his dignity, talking of “preserving his honor,”—forgetting it has so long been dead that even embalming could not preserve it. Day by day Iago dropped his poison; day by day did subtle resentment and studied vengeance distill the poison of distrust and suspicion into more powerfully insidious doses. With a mind wonderfully concentrated by the blackness of his purpose, he wove a network of circumstantial evidence around the pure-hearted Desdemona, and then murdered her vicariously, by the hand of Othello. Her very simplicity, confidence, innocence and artlessness made Desdemona the easier mark for the diabolic tactics of Iago.

Iago still lives in the hearts of thousands, who have all his despicable meanness without his cleverness. The constant dropping of their lying words of malice and envy have in too many instances at last worn away the noble reputations of their superiors.

To sustain ourselves in our own hasty judgments we sometimes say, as we listen, and accept without investigation, the words of these modern Iagos: “Well, where there is so much smoke, there must be _some_ fire.” Yes, but the fire may be only the fire of malice, the incendiary firing of the reputation of another by the lighted torch of envy, thrown into the innocent facts of a life of superiority.

III

The Red Tape _of_ Duty

Duty is the most overlauded word in the whole vocabulary of life. Duty is the cold, bare anatomy of righteousness. Duty looks at life as a debt to be paid; love sees life as a debt to be collected. Duty is ever paying assessments; love is constantly counting its premiums.

Duty is forced, like a pump; love is spontaneous, like a fountain. Duty is prescribed and formal; it is part of the red tape of life. It means running on moral rails. It is good enough as a beginning; it is poor as a finality.

The boy who “stood on the burning deck,” and who committed suicide on a technical point of obedience, has been held up to the school children of this century as a model of faithfulness to duty. The boy was the victim of a blind adherence to the red tape of duty. He was placing the whole responsibility for his acts on someone outside himself. He was helplessly waiting for instruction in the hour of emergency when he should have acted for himself. His act was an empty sacrifice. It was a useless throwing away of a human life. It did no good to the father, to the boy, to the ship, or to the nation.

The captain who goes down with his sinking vessel, when he has done everything in his power to save others and when he can save his own life without dishonor, is the victim of a false sense of duty. He is cruelly forgetful of the loved ones on shore that he is sacrificing. His death means a spectacular exit from life, the cowardly fear of an investigating committee, or a brave man’s loyal, yet misguided, sense of duty. A human life, with its wondrous possibilities, is too sacred an individual trust to be thus lightly thrown into eternity.

They tell us of the “sublime nobleness” of the Roman soldier at Pompeii, whose skeleton was found centuries afterward, imbedded in the once molten lava which swept down upon the doomed city. He was still standing at one of the gates, at his post of duty, still grasping a sword in his crumbling fingers. His was a morbid faithfulness to a discipline from which a great convulsion of Nature had released him. An automaton would have stood there just as long, just as boldly, just as uselessly.

The man who gives one hour of his life to loving, consecrated service to humanity is doing higher, better, truer work in the world than an army of Roman sentinels paying useless tribute to the red tape of duty. There is in this interpretation of duty no sympathy with the man who deserts his post when needed; it is but a protest against losing the essence, the realness of true duty in worshipping the mere form.

Analyze, if you will, any of the great historic instances of loyalty to duty, and whenever they ring true you will find the presence of the real element that made the act almost divine. It was duty,—plus love. It was no mere sense of duty that made Grace Darling risk her life in the awful storm of sixty years ago, when she set out in the darkness of night, on a raging sea, to rescue the survivors of the wreck of “The Forfarshire.” It was the sense of duty, warmed and vivified by a love of humanity, it was heroic courage of a heart filled with divine pity and sympathy.

Duty is a hard, mechanical process for making men do things that love would make easy. It is a poor understudy to love. It is not a high enough motive with which to inspire humanity. Duty is the body to which love is the soul. Love, in the divine alchemy of life, transmutes all duties into privileges, all responsibilities into joys.

The workman who drops his tools at the stroke of twelve, as suddenly as if he had been struck by lightning, may be doing his duty,—but he is doing nothing more. No man has made a great success of his life or a fit preparation for immortality by doing merely his duty. He must do that,—and more. If he puts love into his work, the “more” will be easy.

The nurse may watch faithfully at the bedside of a sick child as a duty. But to the mother’s heart the care of the little one, in the battle against death, is never a duty; the golden mantle of love thrown over every act makes the word “duty” have a jarring sound as if it were the voice of desecration.

When a child turns out badly in later years, the parent may say, “Well, I always did my duty by him.” Then it is no wonder the boy turned out wrong. “Doing his duty by his son” too often implies merely food, lodging, clothes and education supplied by the father. Why, a public institution would give that! What the boy needed most was deep draughts of love; he needed to live in an atmosphere of sweet sympathy, counsel and trust. The parent should ever be an unfailing refuge, a constant resource and inspiration, not a mere larder, or hotel, or wardrobe, or school that furnishes these necessities free. The empty boast of mere parental duty is one of the dangers of modern society.

Christianity stands forth as the one religion based on love, not duty. Christianity sweeps all duties into one word,—love. Love is the one great duty enjoined by the Christian religion. What duty creeps to laboriously, love reaches in a moment on the wings of a dove. Duty is not lost, condemned or destroyed in Christianity; it is dignified, purified and exalted and all its rough ways are made smooth by love.

The supreme instance of generosity in the world’s history is not the giving of millions by someone of great name; it is the giving of a mite by a widow whose name does not appear. Behind the widow’s mite was no sense of duty; it was the full, free and perfect gift of a heart filled with love. In the Bible “duty” is mentioned but five times; “love,” hundreds.

In the conquest of any weakness in our mental or moral make-up; in the attainment of any strength; in our highest and truest relation to ourselves and to the world, let us ever make “love” our watchword, not mere “duty.”

If we desire to live a life of truth and honesty, to make our word as strong as our bond, let us not expect to keep ourselves along the narrow line of truth under the constant lash of the whip of duty. Let us begin to love the truth, to fill our mind and life with the strong white light of sincerity and sterling honesty. Let us love the truth so strongly that there will develop within us, without our conscious effort, an ever-present horror of a lie.

If we desire to do good in the world, let us begin to love humanity, to realize more truly the great dominant note that sounds in every mortal, despite all the discords of life, the great natural bond of unity that makes all men brothers. Then jealousy, malice, envy, unkind words and cruel misjudging will be eclipsed and lost in the sunshine of love.

The greatest triumph of the nineteenth century is not its marvellous progress in invention; its strides in education; its conquests of the dark regions of the world; the spread of a higher mental tone throughout the earth; the wondrous increase in material comfort and wealth,—the greatest triumph of the century is not any nor all of these; it is the sweet atmosphere of Peace that is covering the nations, it is the growing closer and closer of the peoples of the earth. Peace is but the breath, the perfume, the life of love. Love is the wondrous angel of life that rolls away all the stones of sorrow and suffering from the pathway of duty.

The Supreme Charity _of the_ World