Part 3

Students often reject the ethical and economic arguments against gambling. These arguments are valid but it is very hard to get a clutch for them on many minds. You can point out how dishonourable and essentially immoral it is for a man to have money which he did not earn, for which he gave no equivalent, which came to him as no expression of friendship or by no legitimate inheritance. All this is clear to the healthy and manly moral sense. But the gambler does not have such a sense. I have often wondered that the case is not more frequently put from the other side, from the side of the wrong of spending money in gambling. When a man has won on a bet the moral question is lulled but when he has lost there is a chastened mood which can be invited to reflect. What moral warrant did he have for throwing his money away? What does he have to show for it? A million hungry hands were outstretched to him, a world of want and suffering called towards him over land and sea? And he threw his money away――got nothing for it, did nothing with it. In a world like ours, there are parched lips waiting for drink; there are hungry mouths in need of bread:――do we have any right to waste in indulgence in a world like this? Men should scrutinize every dollar that passes through their hands and ask, “What is the very best thing that I can do with this?”

And frugality, self-imposed for the sake of service, will come back to us in rich reward in character and power. Horace Bushnell drew a noble picture of the fruitage of true parsimony in his address at the Litchfield County Centennial in 1851, on “The Age of Homespun”:

“It was also a great point, in this homespun mode of life, that it imparted exactly what many speak of only with contempt, a closely girded habit of economy. Harnessed, all together, into the producing process, young and old, male and female, from the boy that rode the plow-horse, to the grandmother knitting under her spectacles, they had no conception of squandering lightly what they all had been at work, thread by thread, and grain by grain, to produce. They knew too exactly what everything cost, even small things, not to husband them carefully. Men of patrimony in the great world, therefore, noticing their small way in trade, or expenditure, are ready, as we often see, to charge them with meanness――simply because they knew things only in the small; or, what is not far different, because they were too simple and rustic to have any conception of the big operations by which other men are wont to get their money without earning it, and lavish the more freely because it was not earned. Still, this knowing life only in the small, it will be found, is really anything but meanness.

“Probably enough the man who is heard threshing in his barn of a winter evening, by the light of a lantern, (I knew such an example) will be seen driving his team next day, the coldest day of the year, through the deep snow to a distant wood-lot to draw a load for a present to his minister. So the housewife that higgles for a half hour with the merchant over some small trade is yet one that will keep watch, not unlikely, when the schoolmaster, boarding round the district, comes to some hard quarter, and commence asking him to dinner, then to tea, then to stay over night, and literally boarding him, till the hard quarter is passed. Who now, in the great world of money, will do, not to say the same, as much, proportionally as much, in any of the pure hospitalities of life?

“Besides, what sufficiently disproves any real meanness, it will be found that children brought up, in this way, to know things in the small――what they cost and what is their value――have, in just that fact, one of the best securities of character and most certain elements of power and success in life; because they expect to get on by small advances followed up and saved by others, not by sudden leaps of fortune that despise the slow but surer methods of industry and merit. When the hard, wiry-looking patriarch of homespun, for example, sets off for Hartford, or Bridgeport, to exchange the little surplus of his year’s production, carrying his provision with him and the fodder for his team, and taking his boy along to show him the great world, you may laugh at the simplicity, or pity, if you will, the sordid look of the picture; but, five or ten years hence, this boy will probably enough be found in college, digging out the cent’s worths of his father’s money in hard study; and some twenty years later he will be returning, in his honours, as the celebrated Judge, or Governor, or Senator and public orator, from some one of the great states of the republic, to bless the sight once more of that venerated pair who shaped his beginnings, and planted the small seeds of his future success. Small seeds, you may have thought, of meanness; but now they have grown up and blossomed into a large-minded life, a generous public devotion, and a free benevolence to mankind.

“And just here, I am persuaded, is the secret, in no small degree, of the very peculiar success that has distinguished the sons of Connecticut, and, not least, those of Litchfield County, in their migration to other states. It is because they have gone out in the wise economy of a simple, homespun training, expecting to get on in the world by merit and patience, and by a careful husbanding of small advances; secured in their virtue by just that which makes their perseverance successful. For the men who see the great in the small, and go on to build the great by small increments, and so form a character of integrity before God and men, as solid and massive as the outward successes they conquer. The great men who think to be great in general, having yet nothing great in particular, are a much more windy affair.”

Every one ought to roughen life by friendships that will bring into it those influences which are not naturally in our daily associations and will carry us into contact with men and women who struggle harder than we do. A few such friendships will help to keep life from petrification and to make us aware that the world is under a cross, and that our hearts must be as open to all its needs as the heart of the Father of human life is open always.

And we can help to roughen our lives in the very sense in which Christ meant them to be roughened if we will resist the steadily increasing tendency of our day to multiply ways in which we are released from doing things for ourselves. There are none of us who do not have a hundred things done for us that our fathers and mothers had to do for themselves. Little by little, we are ridding ourselves of the responsibility of doing any service for ourselves whatsoever. There is immense gain in this. It gives freedom for larger living but it can go too far, and it would be a great thing if we resolved at periods that we would not let anybody else do for us what we could do for ourselves. There was a day, perhaps, when men needed the other rule, when it was a great deal better to get other people to do things for us than to do them ourselves, but the time has come when the world needs to reverse that principle. What the world wants is not organizers, but deorganizers, men and women who will increase the number of personal services and activities, and who will bring something frugal, simple and elementary back into life to deliver us from the false heaven of ease and self-indulgence, which is as bad as any other kind of hell. Christ came to save us from that.

There is one other way in which we can answer this call, and can deliver ourselves from the curse of smooth living. Around about us on every side there are causes waiting for what men and women can do for them. I do not mean crosses in any great, general, organized sense, in which we send our five, our twenty-five or our hundred dollars to some society and think we have, in that way, carried all the cross that Christ means to have us carry. We cannot fulfill Christ’s command by paying an organization to carry a cross for us. All the work they do must be done, and it must be supported. Millions of dollars that are not being given now ought to be given. But what Christ is waiting for also and what we have got to do if we are to have the satisfaction of the enduring life is to find each of us for himself some true cross of personal service. There are men and women around us who are waiting for some touch of sympathy, some kindness, some unflinching word of ours to them that shall mean the awakening of their own discouraged or sleeping souls, that they may come out to live. “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.”

One of the saddest things in the world to-day is the principle under which those are living who are unwilling to bear these crosses and to bring home into their lives the wholesome spiritual stimulus that this roughening of life alone can give to them. We have reacted too far from the old monastic idea. Men speak with scorn now of those men and women who went away into monasteries and convents, despising the joys of the world for the sake of their souls. But these men and women were infinitely better than the great multitudes who go out into the world to-day, despising their souls for the sake of the joys of the world. If a man or woman wants to do any despising it is better to despise the world than the soul. It were well for us to go back a little to the spirit of the mediæval time. When that spirit was pure and good the world’s richest service flowed out from it.

The glory of life for us consists in finding the rough, the morally austere things in life and then fearlessly and unhesitatingly doing them. There is no splendour in the easy indulgent way. The splendour lies in finding the hard thing to be achieved and revelling in it.

Many years ago I clipped this story from the editorials of what was then our ablest newspaper:

“A young Briton named Felix Oswald became interested a while ago in the geology of Turkish Armenia. He made long journeys through that country and finally came home with an important amount of valuable new material. It was not matter, however, that would find favour in the eyes of the general publisher and Mr. Oswald had to undertake its publication himself. He had the type set at the lowest rates in a small town. There were 516 pages of print and the author undertook the large task of doing the printing himself. He hired a hand press and after weeks of hard work he had produced 101 copies of the book. Feeling certain that this edition would fill the demand he went about the next large job, which was the hand colouring of all his maps and profiles. Then the copies were bound and the book was out.

“Leading geologists say that the work is one of the best of its kind. The small edition is exhausted and the book will not be reprinted. The editor of _Petermann’s Mitteilungen_, believing that a wide circle of geologists would be glad to have the important results of Oswald’s investigations, has just printed in his periodical an extended résumé of them together with some of the maps. The University of London has crowned the work with its approval by conferring the degree of Doctor of Science upon the author. Oswald has certainly earned the congratulations of all who admire the qualities of courage, perseverance and intelligent devotion to a special task.”

A man does not have to go to Armenia to find the hard thing to do, although there are harder and nobler tasks waiting there to-day than Oswald undertook, tasks that are crosses in the divinest sense, scarred with sorrow and grief. And perhaps there are some among us here now who are bearing crosses and finding them beyond their strength. But they are not to be mourned over. They were not of our making, were they? If they were of our making, perhaps there is some penitence to be felt, some restitution to be made. If they were not of our making, we may be sure that they were built just for our shoulder, that One who knew us made them that we might carry them, and become under them what we could never become without them. And if we have no such cross, out from our smooth and easy living, our cozy shelters in which we have been kept and are kept now, One is calling us to come whose ancient word we hear to-day: “I came not to send peace, but a sword. Whosoever would be my disciple must love nothing as much as me, and must be willing to rise up and follow me.” For men and women who will do this in the full and joyous spirit of Francis of Assisi but in the forms suitable to our modern life the summons of God and the world is clear.

LECTURE II

THE CONSERVATION AND RELEASE OF MORAL RESOURCES

One of our most familiar national ideas during recent years has been the conservation of our natural resources, our mines, our forests, our water power, the agricultural capacities of our soil. It would have been a good thing if this idea had occurred to us fifty years earlier. But it is an idea which always comes late to a young nation. So long as the population is sparse and the supply of good land unlimited and it is an easy thing to pick up a living from the surface of the ground, perhaps it is too much to expect that any people would be careful and frugal. But when the population has increased and begins to press against the means of subsistence, when the good public lands are exhausted and a mere living becomes harder for the masses of the people to secure, then any nation awakens to wisdom and turns from recklessness and prodigality.

And, doubtless, the idea would have occurred to us a full generation earlier if it had not been for the terrible education of our Civil War. There is a great deal to be set down on the good side of the account of the Civil War. It took the putty of our national character and burned it into stone. It ran steel fibres through our national life. And it brought us for the first time to a sense of national unity. But alas there is a great deal also on the ledger’s other page. For war is not conservation, it is destruction. It educates any people not in frugality but in wastefulness. Military supplies must be bought at once at any cost. Everything is thrown away with a negligent and wasteful hand. And so long as any people is pouring out its best possession, the precious life-blood of its sons, like water on the battle-field, you cannot expect it to be saving and careful in its material possessions.

The days of waste that followed the Civil War are gone forever. The nation has begun now to count carefully the amount of its available wealth. We have seen calculations of how many millions of feet of lumber we have standing in our forests and how many millions of tons of coal we have still hid away in our treasure houses underground. And far and wide over the nation now we are learning to husband the resources we have left, mindful of our children who are to come after us.

And it is a good thing that the nation in conserving her resources realizes that there is something more important than a careful husbanding of her mere material wealth. The vital resources of any people are of more significance to her than clods of coal, or timber on her hillsides. Of what use would it be to conserve the material resources of any nation if we conserve them only for a deteriorating racial stock? The nation has come to realize that the men and women who compose it are its largest wealth, and that this treasure must be guarded more sacredly than our mines, our forests, or our water power. We have seen, accordingly, a whole new body of legislation growing up, that would have made our fathers stand aghast, fixing the conditions of employment, the age of employees, the sanitary condition of homes and mills, the hours of work and the care of women. The expenditure of immense sums for the protection of the life and health of factory labourers is now readily recognized even by “soul-less corporations,” which formerly fought against all such outlay, as money well invested. In all the nation to-day we realize that there is a more precious wealth than our material wealth. I saw an interesting illustration of this new frame of mind a little while ago in a statement issued by some leading men in Tennessee dealing with the excessive death rate among the negroes of the South. They pointed out that among nine millions of white people the death rate is 160,000, and that among the nine millions of the negroes the death rate is 266,000. In other words, among the negroes, 106,000 more people die every year than among a corresponding number of the whites of our country. In the negro, these men argued, the South had an invaluable asset, a better type of labour on the whole, with all its drawbacks, than any other section of the nation possessed, more docile, more faithful, less troublesome, and the South could not afford to lose this labour which it needed for developing its wealth. These men estimated the economic value of each one of these lives at $350 a year, and the period of that economic value at ten years, so that each one of these wasted lives was a loss of $3,500 to the South, or $371,000,000 each year, one million dollars a day, and they argued that the South could not afford such a waste. The South, they held, must see that the death rate among the negro is reduced to the same proportions as the death rate among the white people, in order that such an enormous economic loss might be averted. We are realizing all over the nation now that a man is a very costly product. You can breed an animal in a few months for the market, but it takes twenty years to grow a man, and no nation can afford to throw away such costly products as men and women. These are its most priceless wealth. If it expects to conserve its treasures and to be prepared for the services of the days to come, it is bound to guard this wealth more sacredly than any other. And American capital and industry have come to see this clearly. Here is one typical utterance by a leading engineer at a meeting of the Immigration Committee of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States:

“Industrial Americanization is a part of the prevalent present-day movement towards the humanizing of industry. It aims to make what is commonly called ‘welfare work’ not an exercise of the individual employer’s ‘paternalism,’ but a legitimate kind of business organization everywhere. There are now innumerable kinds of ‘welfare work.’ One employer does it from the point of view of ‘good business’; another on the ‘big brothers’ theory. One man confines himself to playgrounds, another to safety appliances. In one firm it is under the employment manager; in another under a Y. M. C. A. director; and in a number of other firms it is classified in as many different ways.

“There is no agreement among American employers as to where the organization of the human side of industry really belongs. And there are absolutely no standards for it. What we need to do is to extend scientific methods to the human phases of industrial organization, and thus give ‘welfare work’ a definite place and definite standards. The engineer as the ‘consulting mind’ of industry must be the leader in this work. It is he who determines the site of the plant and its construction. Inside the plant again, the engineer has much to do with efficiency methods. No efficiency methods that are unrelated to the men in the plant can prosper permanently.”

But there is another sort of resource and national treasure greater by far than these, which most of the nations are passing by. I mean the latent and undeveloped capacities for ministry and achievement which lie dormant inside human life. Every life is a reservoir of unawakened possibilities. There is no one of us that is more than a fraction of the man he should be. There is not one who is not falling short by a wide margin of the ideals that he ought to attain, not one who is making the contribution to the nation or building the share in the Kingdom of God that God and mankind alike have a right to expect of him. Not long before his death, an article contributed by Prof. William James, of Harvard, appeared in the _American Magazine_, entitled “The Powers of Man,” in which Professor James argued that mankind is living on a very small fraction of its vitality, and that there are buried underground strata of possibilities and of power which are never tapped except in times of great emergency. For a little time then a man draws on these reserves, and then seals the strata over again and falls back on the surface levels once more. For illustration he spoke of the familiar phenomenon of the second wind. Every boy can remember such experiences. There came a time in the game when he was “all in.” He had done his best and drawn on his last available power. Suddenly it was as though something broke. A partition wall fell in. Unsuspected reserves were released. The second wind came and reservoirs of power that had been withheld came unexpectedly into play and he did better than he had done before, what he had never been able to do before. That is an absolute truth of experience all through life. In our great crises, any one of many forces may unlock these energies and let them loose. And the present needed appeal of the world is to men and women that they should not be content to draw upon these reservoirs in crises alone. The tragic crises come because these powers are not drawn forth and used. The great wealth of the nations and of the world that needs now to be unsealed is just this wealth of moral capacity lying latent and dormant within.