>'V- •,--'// ^>-a-. ■'■(;• . /'l^. \M/,^ It^K^r^J^iL^lIiX^i^U.-J-m^ '-'.Ml: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES GIFT OF CAPT. AND MRS. PAUL MCBRIDE PERIGORD ,^:i;|pite= < A ) 11:' uiv!>! ANGELES jMBKABY <3^Vt_ 3 ^^ LIFE QUESTIONS. BY THE SAME AUTHOR. CHRISTIANITY THE SCIENCE OF MANHOOD. THE RELIGION OF EVOLUTION. i2mo. $1.50. LIGHT ON THE CLOUD. i8mo. $1-25. BLUFFTON : a Story of To-day. wmo. $1.30. i2mo. $1.50. Life Questions. BY M. J. SAVAGE. ^•:i'H/'' BOSTON: Geo H. Ellis, 141 Franklin Strkbt. 1886. 14 4677 Copyright, 1S79, By LOCKWOOD, BROOKS & CO. TO MY MOST MERCILESS CRITIC— MY MOST CAREFUL ADVISER- MY BEST INSPIRATION— MY WIFE. PREFACE. Not of my own motive, but at the request of those who first heard them, these seven Sunday morning addresses are now given to the public in book form. No special claim is set up on their behalf. They are only a piece cut off the web of ordinary work. With one exception they were spoken, not written ; and they are now reprinted from stenographic reports. Believing in the truth of what I try to utter, I am glad to reach as large an audience as possible. This is my only apology. M. J. S. Boston, April, 1879. CONTENTS. Jfirst %xtBtxan. WHAT HAVE I A RIGHT TO EXPECT THE WORLD TO DO FOR ME ? PAGE TAai the World wrongs us, i Sofne Effects of this Belief, ..... 4 The Conditiofis of Life, ...... 6 How the World looks on a New-comer^ . . 8 The inexorable Law, . . . . . . .10 Illustrations, ....... 11 Shall we blame the World 1 15 The World a Market, 16 Causes of Suffering, . . . . . . • 17 The Question answered, . . . . . 21 WHAT IS THE RELATION OF THE BODY TO THE MIND AND SOUL? What is Man ? 25 Abstract Theories, ....... 26 What do we know about it? . . . . .28 The Power of the Body over the Mind, . . 32 Influence of the Body on Morals and Religion, . 35 Contents. The Duty of Physical Development, Practical Applications, Food, Sleep, ..... Work, ...... Menial Inflammation, PAGE 38 39 41 42 44 C^irb #utsti;oti. WHAT IS GOOD SOCIETY AND HOW AM I RELATED TO IT ? Two Meanings of Society, 46 Ideas around which Society has Crystallized, . . 47 What is good Society 1 52 The law of social Success, . . * . '54 Give and Take, . 55 Doers and Grumblers, . . . . . '57 A Charity Principle, ...... 58 Limits of Acquaintance, . . . . . • 5^ Social Obligations, . . . . . . 61 Your Contribution, ....... 64 MeJi and Women, 65 Women and Men, ....... 68 Jfourl^ ^u^slion. HOW MUCH MUST I WORK, AND HOW MUCH MAY I PLAY } Working and Playing, 7^^ Man's Nature, 7^ Labor and Growth, 74 Contents. XI Work and Civilization, • 75 Work and Duty, .... . . . 76 JIow ?nuch Labor ? . , , » . . . 78 Play in Nature, .... 80 Play in Man, . 81 Play and Puritafiism, . . . 82 The underlying Principle, . . . . . . 85 How much Play ? . . . . 86 Work as Dissipation, . . . 87 Perversions, . . . 89 Excess, . 91 ixli\ #W£sti;on. WHAT IS THE TRUE PLACE OF INTELLECTUAL CULTURE ? What is Life? • • • 94 Life a Problem, . 96 Engine and Compass, 97 Meaning of Culture, . . 99 Bread-winning Problem, lOI Moral Problems, . 102 Religious Problems, . 103 Social Problems, . 105 Political Problems, 106 Lntelligence settles them. . . 107 Books atid Alemory, . 107 Are Books practical! . 109 What to read, . . . . no xn Contents, Idealizing the Real, Time to read, Mental Atmosphere, . The Society of Books, Books broaden Men, Books as Recreation, . PAGB III 112 . 114 117 . 118 SHALL I TRY TO BE RICH? Youth and Dreams, ..... . 119 An earthly Paradise, - . , . . . 120 The Dream of Home, 121 The Dream of Position, . 122 The Political Dream, ..... . 123 The Dream of Travel, . . . . . . 124 Gold " the Stuff that Dreams are made of," . 125 Wealth a good Thing, . 126 Evils of Poverty, . 127 Wealth sometimes too dear, . . . . . 127 JEnd higher than Means, ... * . 128 Honesty better than Money, . . . . . 129 Home better than Money, .... . 131 Culture better than Money, . • • . . 132 A Man, or three Dollars, .... . T^ZZ Doing Good as you go, , , » , , ' 135 Get Money, but — , ..... . 135 Rank of Money-makers, . 136 Contents. xui HOW HIGH IS THE RANK OF LOVE? PAGE AH saved if Love not lost, . 138 The World-voyage, . . . . • 139 All for Love, .... 140 The Bird' s Nest, . . . . . 141 Love in Literature, . 143 Love in Life, . . . . . • 147 Sentiment and Setititnentality, . 147 Lligh Water Mark of a World, . 149 Love and Patriotism, . 151 Love and Morals, . . . . • 153 Love and Religion, .... . 154 Love and Law, . . . . . • 155 Love and Retrospect, . 156 Love and Prospect, . . . . • 157 LIFE QUESTIONS. Jfirst ^u^stion. WHAT HAVE I A RIGHT TO EXPECT THE WORLD TO DO FOR ME? That the World wrongs us, '£>' In Music Hall not long ago, speaking of the world and of the difficulties which men and women meet in trying to get through it creditably or suc- cessfully, a prominent lecturer said, in his half humorous way, " This is not a very good world for men and women, anyhow. Three-quarters of it are water, and it is a good deal better place for the development of fishes than it is for men." This simply voices, in a certain way, a sentiment very often expressed, and that has been expressed from the beginning even until to-day, and that the world has by no means heard the last of yet. I wish to read to you, as illustrating another phase of it, two or three lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem : LJFE QUESTIONS. Good-by, proud world ! I 'm going home. Thoit art not my friend, and I 'm not thine. Long through thy weary crowds I roam — A river-ark on tlie ocean brine. Long I 've been tossed like the driven foam ; But now, proud world, I 'm going home. Good-by to Flattery's fawning face ; To Grandeur, with his wise grimace ; To upstart Wealth's averted eye ; To supple oiilice, low and high ; To crowded halls, to court and street; To frozen hearts and hasting feet ; To those who go, and those who come ; Good-by, proud world ! I 'm going home. Thus Mr. Emerson refers not to going home in the sense of leaving the world, as I take it from the rest of the poem, but to deserting the busy life of men and going to his home in the country, retiring to him- self, to his more private life. This general complaint against the world, as though in some sort of fashion it owed us what it does not render, is the point I have in mind, and which I wish to force on your attention. You can trace this same thought away back to the very dawn of the world. It is this which gave its inspiration and which gives its permanent life and interest to the book of Job — this question as to why the world should treat a man as Job was treated. And as you come down the ages you find it the theme of poet and orator and of common conversation in every-day life. This was the central purpose and THE WORLD. point of the great epic of Milton. His purpose, he said, was to "reconcile the ways of God to man." That is, to explain the justice of the way in which the world treats people. That is what it means, I take it, when translated into common speech. And all of us, I suppose, as we grow older, have more or less of this feeling of being out with the world, of being dissatisfied with it ; of feeling that somehow or other it has fallen short of our just expectation ; that it has not given us all that we deserve ; that it has not paid us all it owes ; that it has not furnished the amount of peace, or pleasure, or power, that some- how or other we are entitled to. The young man, as he gets along in life, begins to lose the glow and beauty and force of the ideal that inspired him. As Mr. Julian Hawthorn has lately sung it in a beautiful poem in the London Spectator: Fails boyhood's hope ere long, For the deed still mocks the plan. Men and women all about us feel that somehow the world has wronged them. They, perhaps, are ugly, when they wish they might have been beautiful. Somehow they are out with the world because they are not finer-looking or more attractive. Here is a man who thinks he can write a poem, and the world does not agree with him ; and he is out with the world because its judgment does not coincide with LIFE QUESTIONS. his own. Here is a man who thinks he ought to be richer than he is to-day for all the effort he has put forth ; that he ought to be able to own a finer house and live on a better street; but the world has not given him the power to carry out his wishes, and so he is dissatisfied, disgruntled, as we say, with the world. Here is another man who thinks that he ought to occupy a higher social position than his fellow-men, neighbors and friends concede to him, and he feels that somehow the world has wronged him. There is another man who feels that after all the service he has rendered his party or his country he deserves an office that somebody else gets, and that he must go without, and he feels that the world has wronged him. And so in every direction — you will fill up the picture for yourselves — men feel that the world ought to have done something for them that it has not done ; that they ought to have gotten out of the world something they have failed to obtain. Some Effects of this Belief. The results of this are sometimes exceedingly disastrous and unfortunate. We find one man, such as I alluded to a moment ago, who simply loses the power of his ideal ; who started out full of hope, courage, cheer, believing that the world had grand things for him, and that he might achieve THE WORLD. 5 great results ; but at last he sits down, discouraged, disheartened, content to crawl through the world any way he can. Another man by this process is not simply discouraged ; he is soured, embittered, turned into an enemy and fault-finder against the world, continually fretting, day after day, at its inhabitants and its woes. Another still, in some countries, is turned into a bandit, a robber. He says : " The world is not my friend, and I am not its friend. I will get out of it everything I can." In other countries, where banditti are not very popular or very safe, a man may turn precisely the same force of disgust with the world into a selfish seeking for gain. In business, or in social life, without any regard to the rights or interests of others, he makes himself a selfish man, fighting the world as though it were his enemy, and determined to get out of it, its confusion, its necessities, all that he can, and let it go its own way, as it will. Another man is turned into a misanthrope, like Byron, who vents his spleen through beautiful verses or some other me- dium ; holding himself up before the world in the role of a martyr, asking men's pity and compassion, that a man so wonderfully endowed, so beautiful, so fine, so nobly furnished as he, should not be any better appreciated. Another, perhaps, carries this disgust so far as to reach the brink of suicide itself, from which he plunges into the abyss ; so tired of LIFE QUESTIONS. life, so disgusted with the society of the world that he leaves it and will have no more to do with it. These represent the different phases of the attitude of mind into which men are apt to come, growing out of this demand which they make upon the world, but which the world does not satisfy. T/ie Co7iditions of Life. I propose, then, to raise and answer this ques- tion if I can : How much have I a right to claim of the world, to demand that it shall do for me .■* Let us look at the conditions a moment. Stand by the cradle of a new-born child. The child is what it is by virtue of what .-* Not by virtue of that which any man, woman or child on the face of the earth has done, except its immediate parents and friends and the long line of its ancestry. The child may be beautiful, so fair that as it grows up it shall become a queen in society and find the world in admiration at her feet. The child may be so plain that it shall never win an admirer and go through the world sad and alone. The child may have a brain power that shall fit him to be a king of men, a political leader, an orator, a poet, a master mind in the business concerns of the world, or it may be, so enfeebled in brain and mental activity and power that it shall hardly be able to gain for THE WORLD. itself standing room in the great crowded market of the world ; pressed by others into a corner, fed on the crusts and crumbs that are the leavings of the world's rich tables, or peremptorily thrust out into the dark- ness from which it came. It may be a poet or it may be an idiot. It starts with certain qualities, certain faculties, certain endowments it has received, I say, from the long line of its ancestry reaching back no one knows how far into the darkness and infinity of its past. Now who is to blame for the faculties and powers with which this child enters upon life ? You may blame God if you will, though you have no recourse. There is no higher court of appeal to which we can carry a case like this. You may say it is not right ; but, if you will think for a moment, the only practical definition of right that we can frame includes the idea that there is some person who is responsible and to whom we can appeal to make good our claim. There is no right or wrong in the matter so far as such a definition as that is con- cerned. We stand helpless before a fact. We may blame the parents or the ancestors ; it may be a fault or a folly, a sin or a misfortune of one or many of this long line of ancestry that is responsible for the condition of the child when it starts its life course. But at any rate we cannot help it now. The child is here and is what it is. The point I wish to impress upon you lies in this question : Is the world to blame 8 LIFE QUESTIONS. for it ? What do we mean by the world in a question like that ? We do not mean the general system of the universe, or the soil, the climate, the sun, the stars, the influences of wind and rain. We talk about being out with the world and the world not rendering us its due ; what we practically mean is the men and women that make up the inhabitants of the world at the present time — the time of which we are speaking. Now are these men and women to blame .-* Are they to be praised because this new-born child is a genius ; are they to be blamed because it is in- capable.-* The world has nothing whatever to do with it. Lodge our fault-finding where we will we have no right to say the world is at fault. The world has had nothing to do with it. How the World looks upon a New Comer. How then shall the world look upon this new-born child that is just entering upon its stage .-' The world is pretty full. All the offices are filled and there are ten thousand applicants for every vacancy; all the high positions of responsibility and trust are filled, and there are thousands of people waiting for one here and one there to fall out and give them a place in the higher rank. The world's land is very largely occupied ; it is all owned and there are thousands of people who would like to own land for whom there is THE WORLD. no land to own. All the world is in the possession of people before this child arrives. Does the coming, then, of this child confer any benefit upon the world so that it stands in the relation of obligation towards the child .-' It seems to me rather that it is some- thing like a party at a feast; when a new comer arrives it is only another chair, another mouth to fill, a subdivision of the supplies ; and if the company fills the table and they are agreeably related to each other we cannot feel that they are under any special obligation to the new comer. Here, then, it seems to me is the attitude in which we ought to stand toward this question. The new comer arrives in the world filled with men and women occupying all the places, enjoying so far as they can all the good and sweets and amusements of life, and doing so far as they can all the work. Now, then, by what process — here is the question — by what process shall the new comer establish a claim to the good things of the world } By what right shall he say I ought to have some of this money, I ought to have some of this land, I ought to have one of these offices, I ought to fill one of these high social positions, men oughb- to bow down to my genius and recognize my right and my power.'' Through what process, I say, shall the new comer in the world establish his claim to any such recognition as this .-* The principle is embod- ied, it seems to me, perfectly and crisply in those old 10 LIFE QUESTIONS. words of Paul. The only way by which a child can establish his claim for bread is by the process of labor. " If any man will not work neither shall he eat." Of course from the inexorable working of this law I have mentally excepted the obligation which the father and mother owe to the child. They, who have been responsible for bringing the child into the world, owe to it everything which they possess and which they can possibly do in developing the child and fitting it for the part it is to play in the world ; but outside of father and mother, outside of this intimate home circle, where comes in the obligation.'' And here it seems to me we must face T/ie Inexorable Law — " If any man will not work neither shall he eat." The principle runs through and underlies the whole question that I have raised. Let us look at it in two or three particulars. I think, perhaps, that I could write a poem, and I think the world ought to render me recognition as a poet. What can I do about it } I must write a poem which the world shall recognize as poetry, and for which it shall be willing to pay, else my claim is null and void — mere empty words. I may be ever so sure that the poem I have written is a masterpiece, and that it will give me fame and the gratitude of men ; but if the world does not agree THE WOBLD. n with me, that is, if I have not been able to do something for which the world is willing to pay, then I have not the slightest claim for anything in the shape of fame or money for the poem that I have written. Here is a principle which underlies a great deal of the discontent of the world, much of the present labor question, and the communistic discus- sion, if you will take the trouble to apply it for your- selves. Before I can establish any claim for reward I must do something, not that is simply work, I must do something that the world wants done. Not every man that works shall eat. He must do something that the world wants done and is willing to pay for, before he has any right to demand bread at the world's hands. Illustrations. Suppose that I go out into an unoccupied field and work by the day, by the week, by the month, by the year, in building stone wall, laboring ten or twelve hours a day as hard as I know how. But I am build- ing a stone wall where nobody wants a stone wall, where it does not answer any purpose of keeping anything in or of keeping anything out ; nobody wants a wall there, nobody is willing to pay for its being put there ; consequently I have not the slight- est claim on anybody to pay me for the labor that I have gratuitously performed. The law is that I must 12 LIFE QUESTIONS. do something that the world wants done, and then I may ask the world to pay me for it. Suppose I think I am an orator. Unless I can convince enough people to give me an audience that such is the fact, I have no right to claim any reputa- tion as an orator nor any reward from the world. Suppose I think I am a genius in any direction. If I cherish that opinion all to myself and can find nobody to agree with me, I may think that the world's judg- ment is poor ; I may believe that posterity will accord me that which the world refuses now ; but I have no recourse and I have no right to find fault with the world constituted as it is. Take for example two or three great illustrations, that you may bring before you more forcibly just what I mean. Madame Gerster has been singing to crowded audiences, delighting Boston and the great cities of the country, within the last few weeks. She was born of humble parentage, but she inherited — without any merit on her part — she inherited a miracle of a voice ; and the world that loves to be sung to as marvellously as she can sing, is ready to go in crowds and fling bouquets and pour out money at her feet. Now is anybody to be praised or is anybody to be blamed for this ? Certainly it is no merit of hers that she was endowed by nature with this wondrous quality. Certainly it is no fault of the world that it prefers the singing of a nightingale to the cawing of a crow. THE WORLD. 13 The crow may blame any one he pleases for not having a better voice, but he cannot blame people for not liking his voice unless it is better. So if another person thinks he can sing, but cannot convince the world, in any large numbers, that his conviction is a fact, he has no fault to find, it seems to me, with the world. Even when the individual is right and the world is wrong, what shall we say then .-' Take a case like Milton. Milton wrote one of the grandest epics of the world, and received as pay for it not the wages of a hod carrier or a common carpenter, counted in money. It received very few readers and very few admirers in his own life time ; but he was conscious in his own mind that he had written a work that the world would not willingly let die. Was the world to blame .'' I think not. The men and the women that made up the city of London at the time Milton wrote were not to blame for their lack of culture or poetic taste. Just as Milton had inherited his mag- nificent brain, so they had inherited brains that were unable to perceive its magnificence. It seems to me they are no more to be blamed than blind people are for not admiring pictures, or deaf people for not loving music. They received what they could, and they praised and petted inferior poets, while they neglected him. But they praised and petted the best they could think and appreciate. And Milton, did he lose his reward .'' Would Milton have been willing. 14 LIFE QUESTIONS. could he have foreseen the future, to have taken large money payment from the crowds of London at his time, and have lowered his genius down to their level so that they could appreciate it and would be willing to pay ? Would he have been willing to have taken that and been forgotten, or would he rather prefer the consciousness of the magnificence of his genius and look for the recognition of higher and nobler times ? Another striking illustration. I have received a paper this week, speaking of the wonderful amount of money which Madame Anderson has received recently in New York, for the marvellous feat of walking which she has performed. She walked twenty-seven hundred quarter miles in twenty-seven hundred quarter hours, all inside of a few days, and she has received for it fifteen thousand dollars. A mother, faithful in the performance of her duty and the care of her children, laboring night and day, watching anxiously and carefully over her babe, spends weeks and months and years, and never sees at once perhaps one hundred dollars. This higher quality of faithful, noble, self-sacrificing motherhood the world does not pay by its thousands of dollars, as it does one that can perform some wonderful physical feat like this. Here is another woman who has a literary genius and success. She writes and the world appreciates and admires, but she gets no such THE WORLD. 15 pay for her brains as Madame Anderson received for her muscle. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the one man, the one American, that Mr. Whittier says will be sure to be remembered for a thousand years, for all his writings, all the magnificent wealth of his poetry and genius, has never received from his publishers so much as Madame Anderson made in a few days walking. Shall we blame the World f Here is the point — what shall we say .-' Has the world wronged Emerson } I think not. It seems to me we must answer again just as we did before. There is not a child in Boston that would not pay more to see Punch and Judy than it would to see Hamlet. Shall we find any fault with the child } We may, if we choose, find fault with the constitution of the universe that determines that the progress of life shall be by development from the simplest things up through childhood to appreciative, large-hearted, large-brained, manhood and womanhood. We may if we will, find fault with the constitution of the uni- verse that determines that the progress of men on earth shall be from the smallest and lowest beginnings, up through the childhood of the race, and only after long ages attain the magnificence of heart and brain that is able to appreciate the highest and grandest things. But so long as the world is in its childhood 1 6 LIFE QUESTIONS. Stage, so long as the great masses of men are in their childhood stage, we must expect them to be happy with childish things. But Emerson is not wronged. He has his reward. He i-s receiving it and will receive it in the ages that are to come. Would he exchange those wonderful poems, those marvellous essays, that seer-like insight, that genius of poetic and powerful expression, the place that he holds of love, of worship, in thousands of hearts that are capable of appreciating him — would he exchange that for Mad- ame Anderson's muscle and fifteen thousand dollars .-' Even Emerson is not wronged. Though his pay be small in cash ; i-n love and reverence and genius and power and magic mastery of the hearts and lives of his fellow-men, he has received a thousand-fold, and will in the ages that are to come. "^t)^ T/ie World a Market. Remember, then, that this is the law. Here is the world — a great market. Go into the world and buy what you will, but remember you have no claim on anything unless you can pay something that the world wants. If you choose to amuse the world, to appeal to the lower passions and tastes of the world, then, since the majority of men are only partially developed, you will gain a larger admiration at the present time ; you will gain more money, but you will THE WORLD. 17 be forgotten when the world has outgrown you. If you want to render the world a service in the higher ranges of heart and intellect, then serve the world — those that can appreciate you — and bide your time. Choose, and take the consequences of your choice. I would carry it so far, even, as to say that the world's martyrs have no right to find fault with the world. The world did not appreciate, it cast out and crucified Jesus Christ. Was the world to blame ? Only in the sense that an ignorant man is to blame because he does not appreciate a high work of genius ; only in the sense that the child is to blame because he is not a man. Jerusalem worshipped that which it thought was righteous. It bowed down before that which it thought was sacred and true and holy ; and it cast out Jesus with just as much consci- entious sincerity as we, to-day, frown upon and cast out those that we cannot appreciate or believe in. In some cases the world is wrong, in others it is right ; and the martyr takes his pay in the consciousness of his high choice, and in the admiration of the world when it has grown to be large and grand enough to admire. Causes of Suffering. Passing, then, rapidly over this principle, now let us raise the question as to who is to blame if the world is not. If we have no right to find fault 2 1 8 LIFE QUESTIONS. with the world because it does not give us what we think it ought to pay, who is to blame ? And here I wish to bring out an idea large enough and far- reaching enough in its sweep and consequences to make not a sermon but a book in itself. I wish to bring out the idea that a large part of the evils under which we suffer, and for which, in a general way, we blame the world and get out with it, are things that we ourselves are responsible for, that we can either prevent or cure ; not always, not completely, but so largely that if we would devote our heart and our strength to it we could renovate life. Look for a moment, and let me run through a few of the things and evils that we suffer under, those that cause the greatest amount of pain, and discomfort, and trial, — what are they ? First on the list stands ill-health. Half the world's sorrows, half its troubles, half its discomforts at least, half its discouragements, half its melancholy, half its blues that color and darken the world, come simply from that one thing, ill-health. Who is to blame for that .'' In some cases we are not. We have inherited a tendency toward disease. But nine times out of ten — I say it in case of my own sickness, including myself just as much- as anybody else — we ourselves are to blame. In a general way, I believe it is among the duties of men and women to be well. I think that in nine cases out of ten men and THE WORLD. 19 women might fairly be called on to show cause why they are sick. I have not been sick in any serious fashion but once for several years, and then nobody in the wide world was to blame for it but myself. We eat, and drink, and dress, and expose ourselves ; are thoughtless and careless in every direction, and so most of th-e sickness under which we suffer is purely and simply our own fault ; not the fault of the world or the fault of our neighbors — evils that are curable or preventable. What is the next great cause of suffering, of the pains, the discomforts we bear.'' It seems to me it lies just here. Not that we have not enough to make us happy, enough to make us comfortable, but that while having all the things, the raw material of comfort and well-being about us, we persistently fasten our attention on something we have not, and determine to make ourselves miserable on that account. There is hardly one of you all that has not the materials for a comfortable and happy life. We are like the children that we watch and reprove for their peculiarities. I see my own children playing on the floor in a perfect wilderness of books and toys, miserable, unhappy and discontented because they do not possess something they would be tired of in five minutes if they had it, just as they are of the things they have; or because some other boy or some other little girl that they know has something 20 LIFE QUESTIONS. they have not. How large a part of the discomforts, the sorrows, the sufferings that trouble you, grow out of precisely such a root as that. You are living, perhaps, on such a street, having everything that heart can wish, but miserable because you have not the finest house on a more fashionable avenue. Because you have not something that somebody else has, you are discontented and unhappy. Purely needless, you have no right to find fault with either God or man for sufferings and discomforts like these. And then there is another grand source of suffering and sorrow for which we are disposed to blame the general system of things, the universe, or God, or man, or somebody else, when nobody is responsible for it but ourselves ; and that is this persistent fore- boding of evil. People, on the pleasantest day, if you say, " It is a pleasant day," will look all around the sky to see if they cannot find a weather -breeder somewhere that will promise a storm to-morrow. They will shoulder upon themselves and be crushed down by a hundred burdens that they have not the least assurance in the world that they will ever be called on to bear. One-half at least of the burdens we carry, and that crush our hearts and make us sad, are pure shadow trials of which we have no business to take any account. And then there is another grand source of sorrow and discomfort that comes to people, oh, to so many THE WORLD. 2 1 — ennui — the feeling that their life is useless and aimless, purely for the reason that they have not some grand, noble thing to do to wake up their enthusiasm, to stir them, to lift them up, to make them feel their life is worth living. People will live year after year in a condition like this when the world is not half finished, hardly begun, and on every hand is work calling, begging, appealing to be done, if men would only find it ; if women would only find it. I think it is just to say that women in high states of civilization are the ones that suffer most from this, almost for the simple reason that either their sense of propriety or their habits or training, or something or other, keeps them from going out into the world and finding something to engage their hand and heart, and to fill up the measure and fullness of their enthusiasm. The Question answered. These then, with others that I shall leave you to think of, are the grand burdens under which we suf- fer. And as I said, they are burdens that you need not carry, or at least you need not carry to one-half the extent which you do. What, then, in a word of suggestion, in the light of these truths that I have outlined, in the light of these burdens needlessly borne, what, in the summing up, have I a right to say that we may reasonably expect of the world .'* Here 22 LIFE QUESTIONS. we are ; each one of us having come into this world as the scene of our activity and enjoyment or suffer- ing. What may we expect reasonably to gain by it ? The world offers — and you have no claim on it by which you may assume that it would offer anything else — the world offers opportunity. Here for exam- ple is an opportunity for you to enter into all this wondrous mysterious universe of beauty. Oh, how blindly we walk over the face of this marvel of a world ! We stumble along amid the grass and the flowers. Some one comes behind us that can appre- ciate their beauty and their mystery, and bows down before them awe-struck, at the marvel and over- whelmed with the wonder that we neglect and scorn. The world all around us is one marvel of wonder and beauty ; and the key to it is what .'' Thought, culti- vation, appreciation of every opportunity, purity of heart and thought on our part. Until we attain this the world will be locked to us wherever we are. Put any man into the finest picture gallery of the world, surround him with superior works of art, but if he have not purity of heart and appreciation, something of self-development and culture, there is a veil drawn over every beauty and nothing is open to him. If you will only fit yourself to appreciate it the world offers you limitless mystery and beauty. It affords you an opportunity in another direction — an opportunity of doing some good service. People THE WORLD. 23 talk about the world's being full. You remember that saying of Daniel Webster's, that advice of his to a young lawyer who asked him if there was any room in the legal profession. He said there was " room enough at the top." We feel perhaps in regard to the mechanical development of the world that almost everything has been invented that can be. But every little while somebody startles the world with some new mechanical contrivance. We feel that every great subject for poetry has been written upon ; until some man with a deeper insight startles the world with a fresh masterpiece. There is room enough, there is opportunity everywhere. The world is not exhausted; hardly the surface has been scratched. There is just as much opportunity for the grand ser- vice of man — for heroism, for nobility, for devotion — as there ever was. Perhaps we shall not become distinguished for the doing of these things that we can perform. No matter ; you had better be fit for an office than to be in it ; you had better be worthy of fame than to get it ; you had better be worthy of love and all men's honor than to have them at your feet and know in your own heart that you are hollow and a sham. There is opportunity to be, there is opportunity to do as noble things as the world has ever dreamed. Here is the secret of content, and you will never find it anywhere else. I appeal to you to- day, to look through all your past life while I tell you 24 LIFE QUESTIONS. it is true of my own experience, and to ask yourself if it is not true of yours, that the solidest comfort you have ever attained has been when you have waked up to the consciousness that you have been of some little use to somebody, that you have done some good to the world. There is, then, an opportunity for happiness as well as beauty and service. There is no one of you that has not about him abundant opportunities for happiness in this poor old world that we call sin-sick and corrupt and evil. You may have a friend if you will only prove yourself worthy of one by being a noble and true friend yourself. You may gain the love of some man or woman noble as you deserve and perhaps a good deal nobler. You may have a home, children of your own, or others, loving you and looking up to your face with worship, and playing about your feet. You have all the mate- rials out of which to construct a song sweet as the choiring stars above you. The only condition is that you shall make your lives as bright and orderly as the stars. Swontr ^mQiion. WHAT IS THE RELATION OF THE BODY TO THE MIND AND SOUL ? W/ia^ is Manf If we should stand for the first time in the presence of another man, and try to find out what sort of a being he is, what would be the result ? In the first place, of course, the outline and bulk of his body would be apparent. If there were an anatomist by he would tell us the bones of which the inner structure of this body were composed. The physi- ologist would tell us about the muscles and the organs, their relations, their functions, the part they play in this mechanism. The chemist would tell us of what elements the body is made ; how much water, how much lime, how much this, that and the other go to make it up. The artist would look at it from the standpoint of beauty. And so each one, according to the trend of his thought and investiga- tion, would help us to form our complete conception of the external or physical man. But if we raise the 26 ^JFE QUESTIONS. question, Is this all of him ? we shall find out that from the first dawn of human history until now, practically all men everywhere — there have been few exceptions — have believed that this was not all. They have said, inside of this physical frame, located at some particular point, or diffused through it, is a spiritual entity ; somewhere about this physical man there is another somewhat called mind, soul, shade, spirit, or whatever name may have been applied to it. Sometimes they have spoken of two or three invisible tenants, or invisible under ordinary circumstances, though capable of manifesting themselves at times to the eye, to the ear, to the touch. Paul divides man, in one of his epistles, into three parts, a sort of human trinity, the body, the animal soul and spirit or immortal soul. I am not now going into the varie- ties of thought concerning these subjects, the origin of the belief, nor the line of its development. These questions lie outside of my present purpose. But I must, in passing, give you two or three principal theories that have been held concerning the relation in which body and mind stand to each other. Abstract Theories. There is a body, and there is a something we call mind. The school of materialists, ancient and mod- ern, whatever difference of form their speculations THE BODY. 27 may take, teach us that the mind is in some myste- rious way a product of the bodily organization ; and they tell us that when the body is taken to pieces by death, the mind itself will dissolve and cease to exist as a separate entity. Mind, then, according to the materialist, is the product of the body. There is another school, and that ancient and modern, which holds to the pre-existence of this mind or soul, and they teach the precise contrary of the materialists ; that is, they say the mind existed first, and it has shaped the body to itself, making of it a fitting instrument. So, while the one school teaches that the mind is the result of body, the other teaches that the body is the result of mind. There is another school of thought still, connected with the famous name of the great philosopher, Leibnitz, who taught what he called the pre-established harmony ; that is, he could not understand how the body could act on mind, or mind could act on body, and so he taught the doctrine that God, from the first, established a sort of harmonious relation between these two, designating definitely their influence. So that when I think of moving my arm the arm moves ; but he says it is not the thought that makes it move ; only God has established such a relation between the thought and the arm that they move together ; when the thought wishes the arm to move the arm moves : and so concerning every other mental or physical 28 LIFE QUESTIONS. operation. Still another school, represented chiefly by Spinoza, teaches the doctrine of pantheism. This holds that God himself is the only real substance in the universe, the only substantial being, and that matter and mind both are only local and temporary manifestations of God — only waves rising for a moment and sinking again into the sea of eternal and everlasting being which is God. These are the four grand theories that have been held concerning the relation of the mind and the body. W/iai do we Know about It? Now, I propose to come simply and directly to the question, How much do we really know about it.'' what do we know about mind .-' what do we know about body, and the relation they sustain to each other.? Directly, we know nothing at all about either of them, as to what they are in their essence. We know nothing at all about matter in itself ; we know nothing at all about mind in itself. All that we do know is certain facts of consciousness. For example, I touch this book. I receive an impression of some- thing hard and smooth. This touch is transmitted by the nerves to the brain, and in some mysterious way — I know not, and nobody knows — I become conscious of touching something that resists my touch, and that is smooth to my hand. I infer the THE BODY. 29 existence of something possessing those qualities that I call hardness and smoothness. This is the only knowledge we have of this external world. People sometimes seem to think they know all about matter; but you know nothing at all except by this method of inference from your various sensations. What do we know about mind .'' Our knowledge about mind is of precisely the same kind — an infer- ence from consciousness. I think. I infer, then, that there is something that corresponds to this sensation of thought. I have a feeling of love, of hate, of fear, of hope. I infer that there is something that thinks, something that loves, something that hopes, some- thing that fears. And here comes a distinction that I wish to make very clear in its impression upon your minds. Matter translates itself into my consciousness as something having length, breadth, thickness, hardness or power of resistance, color, weight, and other attributes with which you are perfectly familiar. Things which manifest themselves to me in this way I call matter. But the thought of the mind, love, hope, fear — these things have no thickness, they have no length, they have no breadth, they have no weight, they have no color. There is, then, so far as we know anything about it, not simply a difference between these two, but an absolute unlikeness. Now, then, as I said a moment ago, the materialist sometimes talks as 30 LIFE QUESTIONS. though he knew all about matter, but knew nothing about mind. If he will think a little more deeply, he will find that he knows just as much about mind as he does about matter; and that, as to what they are in themselves, he knows nothing at all about either of them. We only infer certain things from these facts of consciousness. Here, then, is what we know concerning what matter is, and what mind is. But we do know that these two somewhats are related to each other in some mysterious way ; in such a way that the body acts upon the mind, and the mind in its turn reacts upon the body ; or, if you choose to start the other way, the mind acts and the body reacts. There is mutual action and reaction between the body and the mind. And how important and mighty this movement of action and reaction is I propose to illustrate by reading just a few words from a book which I have in my hand. In No. 3 of the Popular Science Monthly Supplement is an arti- cle by Mr. Frederick Harrison on the subject of " The soul and the future life." In it he uses these words — I read them because, in a compact and simple way, they express all that I wish to bring before you better than I could state it: " Man is one, however compound. Fire his con- science and he blushes ; check his circulation and he thinks wildly or not at all ; impair his secretions and the moral sense is dulled, discolored or depraved ; THE BODY. 31 his aspirations flag, his hope and love both reel ; impair them still more and he becomes a brute. A cup of drink degrades his moral nature below that of a swine. Again, a violent emotion of pity or horror makes him vomit. A lancet will restore him from delirium to clear thought. Excessive thought will waste his energy. Excess of muscular exercise will deaden thought. An emotion will double the strength of his muscles ; and at last a prick of a needle or a grain of mineral will in an instant lay to rest forever his body and its unity." That sets forth in a very forcible way the power which the mind has on the body, and which the body has on the mind. By ill using the body you are perfectly aware that you can utterly destroy mental power, and lay it, so far as we know upon this earth, at rest forever. And it is not simply in story books or in poems that you come across the facts of the marvelous power which the mind has over the body. There are perfectly well-authenticated cases, in medi- cal treatises and in scientific works, of the mind's having had the power to disease the body, to cripple it, and even to put it to death. Not alone in poetry do men die of a broken heart, I believe that the reality of death from broken heart is just as real as death from fever or from consumption. 32 LIFE QUESTIONS. The Power of the Body over the MtJtd. So mighty is the power of the mind over the body. But the point which I wish to dwell upon more espe- cially now, is the power of the body over the mind. Let me give you in two or three ascending grades of thought, some illustration of what I mean. You are perfectly familiar with the idea that as you rise in the morning your bodily condition may make all the difference in the world with the weather or aspect that the day shall present to you. A headache, the result, perhaps, of a late supper or of the dyspepsia, may not only be able to clothe the earth in gloom, and drape the heavens in blackness, but spread a pall over life so black that it does not seem to you worth living. The condition of the body, then, touches very intimately the question of happiness. It touches no less intimately the conditions of good work in the world. Here is a thing very simple and yet far- reaching and true, that the best work of the world, the healthiest, noblest work, has always been done by healthy physiques, by strong bodies, by good diges- tions. One of the most important things in the world for a man who will do nobly and faithfully his life work, is the condition in which he shall keep his body. One of the most important do I say } Why it is all important ; more so, perhaps, than almost TEE BODY. 33 anything else. For whatever the mind may be able to do in another sphere, whatever it may be able to do when finally separated from this body, we know that here mental and spiritual action depend entirely upon physical conditions. It has been a popular doctrine that the body was a sort of veil, a covering, the prison-house of the soul ; and you hear it many a time in poetry, in song, in popular pulpit discourse, this talk of the body being a drag upon the soul, and of how we will mount up on wings as light as air when once the body is broken down and we are free. It is all a fancy and a dream. That is, there is not one single thing that we know that looks that way in the slightest. So far as we know anything about it the body is not an obtsruction to the soul, the body is not a prison-house ; the body is not a bandage, bind- ing and crippling and limiting its freedom and its power. It is the divinely appointed medium of men- tal and spiritual manifestation ; the only means by which we come in contact with the universe of God and our fellowmen. I know nothing about what the conditions of life may be when the soul is finally freed from the body, but so far as this life is con- cerned the power of the spirit, the power of the mind over the world is limited by and conditioned on the physical condition, physical health, and physical fit- ness for the work we have to do. If there were either an angel or a God under the dome of the skull, 3 34 LIFE QUESTIONS. his ability to work in this world would be limited and conditioned by the brain. No matter how magnifi cent mental power may be, it is limited, I say, and conditioned by the instrument with which it must work in coming into contact with this physical life that we live here beneath the stars. If Hercules should come again to earth, and instead of his club you should put into his hands a brittle reed and compel him to work and strike with that, it would not be the power of Hercules, it would be simply the power of the reed. He would be limited by the instrument with which he must work. Take the magnificent power of steam ; if you enclose it within a weak, ill- constructed or broken engine, you have not the almost omnipotence of steam at your disposal ; you have simply a crippled and broken engine. Take an artist and give him poor canvas, and poor pigments, and a poor brush, and he cannot display his real power ; you have limited him by the instruments and by the materials with which he must work. So, I say, whatever this mental or moral power of the brain may be, it is limited by the condition of the brain ; and the condition of the brain is limited by the condition of the body, which is the basis and con- dition of all high mental and spiritual work. I say, then, that the body has power to cripple all the noble work that you might be able to do. There are a few cases that are apparently exceptions to this rule — THE BODY. 35 geniuses and poets who were physically diseased throughout their whole lives. But you may go through the whole list from every ancient and civil- ized nation of the world, and pick out those that did work under conditions of disease, and you will find traces of that disease marring and crippling, or lim- iting the results. Rounded, complete mental work has only been done by minds that sat enthroned in healthy brains. Iiiflueiice of the Body on Morals and Religion. Not only that, but moral conditions are determined very largely by the condition of the body. A promi- nent scientific man in Germany, after having spent years in studying the skulls and brains of criminals, has made this assertion ; that not once in his whole life has he found a confirmed and chronic criminal who had a healthy brain. Where do chronic pauper- ism and chronic vice and chronic crimes of our great cities come from .-• In exceptional cases — perhaps no exception to this law, however, if we could trace them — in exceptional cases they come from the families with healthy ancestry, and living in the midst of healthy conditions ; but nine out of ten, ninety-nine out of a hundred, come out of impure sanitary and physical conditions, where the very air is miasma, disease and death. LIFE QUESTIONS. Not only morals, but even religions, the distorted conceptions of God, the theological infamies of the past, the libels on the divine character, the shapes of demoniac power and hate that we see conjured from the depths of darkness — all these, without exception, have come from diseased, distorted, unhealthy physi- cal conditions of the world ; come from those times of half-development, when the brain itself was hardly human ; when man had not learned the power by which he is subjected, the underlying forces of the world about him ; when he looked upon the lightning, the storm, the pestilence, the famine, the cold and the hunger as spirit enemies that sought to destroy him. These theologies that to-day make the popular God a Moloch, the theologies that teach such dis- torted and hopeless thoughts concerning man, the theologies that people the heavens above us and the future with shapes of horror — they are simply un- healthy dreams that haunt man's waking hours. They have come out of physical unhealth and physi- cal incapacity reaching up so as to grasp, as it were, the powers of thought and love and hope that we call the mental and spiritual forces of man. Such then, reaching from the simple beginning of happiness up through the centres of life to morals and to God — such is the sweep and scope of this power which the body and its conditions are able to exercise over the mind, the heart, and the soul. TEE BODY. Z7 The Duty of Physical Development. You ought, then — and here is one result follow- ing from these thoughts, if I have placed them clearly before you — you ought, you that are fathers and mothers in your homes, to make it your first care to see to it that the children grow up physically strong and well. And I wish to warn you and to put you on guard concerning the matter of schools — the mental development of your children. So far as the future of your boy or girl is concerned, the capacity to do the work that will be laid upon their shoulders by and by, to carry life's burdens, more than on everything else this capacity depends on the simple matter as to whether the boy or girl is or is not healthy. Knowledge of music, knowledge of mathematics, knowledge of history, knowledge of anything is insignificant compared with the question as to whether, when they stand on the border land of manhood and womanhood, they stand there physical- ly strong and well. There is a lesson here of charity as indicated in what I have said concerning the moral and theological perversions, crimes, distortions and diseased ideas of the world. Not that these things are made right merely because they spring out of physical conditions ; but remember at any rate that they are matters largely beyond individual control, 144677 38 LIFE QUESTIONS. matters to be delivered from by slow degrees ; and let charity dwell in your heart, and love in your nature, and encouragement find utterance through your voice. And remember that not simply by build- ing churches, not simply by establishing rituals, rites, holidays, and scattering bibles and good books over che world are you to lift up the moral and spiritual condition of man. I believe that the souls of men would be helped more really in our great cities by cleansing the slums, lifting up these low places, giv- ing men good air to breathe, good water to drink and healthful homes to live in. I say that morals and religion would be helped on more rapidly by these things than by all the preaching and all the mag- nificent rituals of long ages ; for these things are at the foundation of it all. Practical Applications. The practical outcome of this and the lessons that I wish to enforce upon your minds are some very commonplace ones, very commonplace indeed ; and yet, because commonplace, exceedingly important for you to think about and regard. What are the conditions of keeping the body in health so that the mind may be free and clear and strong .'* There are certain things that are beyond our control that I will only hint at, matters of inheritance of which I have THE BODY. 39 spoken. Then there may be, for aught we know, emanations from the earth, electrical currents sweep- ing around the globe ; influences of sun and planet and stars ; forces that touch us when we do not know that we are touched ; things that lift up and depress, concerning which we have no practical knowledge, and if we had knowledge perhaps we should have no practical power to control. But the great things are the very small things. Food. And first the simple matter of food. It used to be taught that the student and the religious man ought to under-feed themselves ; that if they ate too much they clogged the brain and interfered with mental progress. Of course that is true, if one eats too much. But out of this anxiety not to eat too much have grown maxims such as " Always rise from the table while you are hungry." If a man eats so rapidly that he may get a good deal more than he needs before he finds it out, why, he had better rise from the table hungry. But if he eats slowly, so that he knows when he has eaten enough, then he had better eat always until he is satisfied. And then it is often said that people eat too many kinds of things, and those that are too nice in quality. It is said that you must live on graham bread, oatmeal mush, on 40 LIFE QUESTIONS. this thing or on that ; or you must not eat more than one kind of thing at a meal. Do not think these are unimportant things, not dignified enough to be spoken of in the pulpit. I tell you they reach to your mind and to your morals ; they reach to your theology ; they reach clear to heaven, so far as you are con- cerned, and are of fundamental importance, touching your religious and moral life a good deal more, some- times, than what you think about the Bible, or think about Sunday, or think about any other religious institution whatever. What shall I say, then, concern- ing this matter of how many kinds of things you may eat .'' The safest rule is, so far as they are within your means, eat just as many kinds of things as you want and can get. The body is made up of a large number of chemical constituents. If you eat only one thing, the chances are that you will supply only a part of the wants of the body. Your appetite, if you are healthy, is a good guide. Eat enough, then, and eat as many kinds of things as you please. Feed the body, feed it properly and feed it enough, for the sake of mind, and for the sake of character. For a diminution of food may not only render one insane, but a poor quality of food may be the root, not only of physical deterioration, but of moral as well. If I had time I could give you many illustrations of this. Take it to-day on trust, and look it up for yourselves. THE BODY 41 Sleep. And the next most important matter concerning health is sleep. How many hours shall I sleep ? You might as well ask how much water a sponge will hold. Try it and find out, and let it absorb all that it will. And so I believe that it is not simply your right, but your duty to sleep all that you can sleep. Tedious watching, care and anxiety, a thousand things may interfere to rob you of this, which is a fundamental condition of health. And yet sleep all you can. But do not fall into this error, which was so common a few years ago — I believe it is being outgrown — this thinking it is a virtue on the part of your children to get up very early in the morning, before they have slept enough. The simple fact that you want to sleep is God's command, as sacred as though it came right out of heaven to you, to sleep. The desire to sleep means that sleep is needed. There is no rule, then, that you can follow. If you are compelled to sit up late, then sleep late in the morning. It is no virtue on your part to get up early, unless you have slept enough. The only virtue about it is to get up when you have slept all that the body needs, and all that the brain needs. And particular emphasis ought to be laid upon this matter, concerning those in business or in the pro- 42 LIFE QUESTIONS. fessions. A man who gets up at six o'clock in the morning and goes to work in the mill, or with the shovel, or with the axe, may sometimes think that the professional man is simply lazy and self-indulgent, because he does not get up until eight o'clock ; when, perhaps, after the day's labor he himself went to sleep at eight or nine o'clock, and has slept enough : while the professional is kept up until ten, eleven, twelve, or two o'clock. And then, on the other hand, he overlooks the other fundamental fact that he who performs mere physical labor can rest by simply keeping still, whether he sleeps or not. But there is no way of resting the brain except by sleep ; that is, the brain will not keep still except it is asleep. So that the professional man, or the man who works with his brain, needs more sleep than he who works with his hands. Work. And then the matter of labor ; this also is neces- sary to health. Something to do, something that shall call out all the faculties. And, then, the matter of recreation. I cannot dwell upon these. I simply suggest them to you. Labor and recreation are just as essential to health as food and sleep. Now there is much that may be said upon the other side. I have dwelt purposely and chiefly on the effect the body THE BODY. 43 has upon the mind. I wish to close now with some suggestions, condensed into one, concerning the power of the mind over the body. Keep the mind healthy, because if the mind is diseased in its action, getting unhealthy and morbid, it reacts on the body, diseasing that; and the body again reacts on the mind, and makes it worse than it was to begin with. If some diseased action starts in the body, in the hand, or in any other organ, it causes an unusual and unnatural supply of blood there ; that raises what we call an inflammation, and this intensifies and grows, increasing the diseased action, until, if it be not arrested by the physical forces of the other parts of the system, it results in death. The blood produces an increase of power where it does not belong ; pre- cisely as though a mill should have an unusual head of water turned on. If you turn on just the right quantity of water, the wheels will run just as you want them to, and do the kind of work you wish them to do ; if you lessen the supply, of course there is want of action, and the work is not done ; if you increase it, and turn it into a flood, there is activity, but the very action operates to the destruction of the machinery. Precisely a similar thing goes on in the body in the case of inflammation of this kind. 44 LIFE QUESTIONS. Mental Inflammation. And a similar thing goes on in the mind. When there is excessive action of the mind on one principle, or upon one idea, all the forces of the being, turn themselves to one thought, and then become inflamed and diseased, until the person becomes one-sided. Carry it far enough, and it is what we call insanity; carry it a little less far, and you have the hobby rider, the one-idea man, the man who never thinks of anything, and who cannot think of anything, except his notion. It works, however, in more serious directions. There are hobby riders who carry this excessive mental action in one direction until they become insane. There are men and women who, for one cause and another, carry a similar action of the mind to such an extent that they become diseased concerning the real work of the world. Take the penitent, for example. Suppose you have done wrong, been guilty of a crime. What of it .-* It is past. It is of no use to sit down and weep over it, and concentrate your thoughts upon it. Leave it ; fling it out of sight ; concentrate your thought on something else, lest you become diseased and morbid in this direction, and unfit for the work of the world. Overbalance this by counter irritation. Live in some other realm, in some other department of your THE BODY. 45 thought, and thus become healthy and redeemed from these morbid influences of the past. To come to a more sensitive point still, but not the less important, concerning affliction or loss. You have lost some dear friend. Some one that was your life, the centre of your heart and of your affection. It becomes with you almost a religion to cherish that memory, to think of that and let the world alone, to sit down beside this grave in the past and let the great work of the world go undone so far as you are concerned. This, when carried too far, ceases to be simply a memory, and becomes a disease. Do not cherish even your griefs, then, over much. Remem- ber what you can do in other paths to the poor, grieved hearts still throbbing, to assist those that are not yet permitted to lie down to sleep, the sorrows all around you that you can heal. Then, overcome this private grief by turning your attention in anoth- er direction, living in another part of your being, and making yourself useful and helpful to the world. WHAT IS GOOD SOCIETY AND HOW AM I RELATED TO IT ? Two Meanings of Society. You will understand of course that I wish a dis- tinction to be drawn between the broader and the narrower senses of the word, society. When we say that man is a social animal, we mean that instead of living by himself it is his nature to congre- gate, to aggregate into communities, into villages, cities, states and nations. We mean something else, something much narrower, something quite distinct, when we speak about the best society, or good society, or when we talk about a person's going into society. It is this less and narrower sense, which needs no further distinction, that I wish you to keep in mind, and about which I am to speak. To some minds this might appear to be a secular topic better fitted for a lecture than a sermon ; and yet, when you reflect how large a part of the ordinary life of the world to-day finds expression in what we call society, you will SOCIETY. 47 agree with me, I think, that the rights, the duties, the obligations in which we stand to each other, as thus related, is something quite important enough to be brought within the domain of moral and religious teaching. Ideas around which Society has Crystallized. First I wish to bring before your minds the differ- ent ideas around which society has been accustomed, in the past, to crystallize itself. The oldest good society on the face of the earth, so far as we know, is that which was represented by the old families, the patrician class for example, in ancient Rome ; those that have behind them a long line of ancestry ; those that can speak of themselves as ancient fami- lies ; who are proud of the achievements, the repu- tations, the renown of their forefathers. Now I believe, as we must, who have studied this question at all, that it is just as true of man as it is anywhere else, that blood will tell. A farmer manifests his faith in this principle when he seeks out the finest variety of pear or grape, when he seeks to graft on to the old variety some new species, some higher and finer and juicier development than he has been able to grow upon the old stock. We recognize it everywhere in the animal world ; and I believe it is just as true in the case of man. This idea sprung 48 LIFE QUESTIONS. first from the pretensions of the old families of kings and nobles that they did indeed have a distinct and separate origin from that of the great mass and ma- jority of men. The Emperors of Peru and Mexico, when the Spaniards came to this new world, asserted for themselves the claim familiar from the first dawn of history in Europe, Asia and Africa, that their ancestors were divine, that they were children of the sun ; the sun looked upon as a deity, a god. And there is an ancient Hindoo tradition traced to the Laws of Manu. This tradition is the origin of the system of caste as it exists in India to-day. It asserts that the Creator made the Brahmins out of his brain — of his head ; that is the highest caste. That he created the soldiers out of his arms, his shoulders and his breast ; that the artisans and agriculturists were created out of his thighs and his loins ; and that the servants sprung from his feet. They had then, a distinct and separate origin for all these castes and classes of men from the highest to the lowest ; they believed they were distinct ; and on any account, consequently, could not be fused together. I say I believe there is something noble about this tradition of a grand ancestry. I can understand the pride of the old Spaniard, who called himself an Hidalgo — son of somebody. But this rule does not work succesfully down from the first to the last, and we find that the principle SOCIETY. 49 finally runs itself completely out. The sons of noble fathers are not always themselves noble. The sons of the wise and great are sometimes stupid and foolish, because other blood comes in and it is impos- sible to keep the quality of an ancestry like this from being mixed and mingled with all sorts of foreign changes and taints that shall change its grain and course. And it has been found that this form of society wears itself out and passes away because there are men sprung from the lowest ranges of society, that by the power of brain and heart assert their right to stand at the front and lead the world. And the men that simply had great fathers are com- pelled to bow before the great son of a father who was not great. And so I say this principle wears itself out. And where it lingers to-day, the remnant, the last played-out fag-end of this old tradition in the F. F. Vs. of the South or the Van Something-or- others of our great metropolis, or in the sons of those whose fathers were somebody or something in our Colonial history, it becomes simply a theme for amusement and ridicule. And who is there of us that would not rather be, as Napoleon said he was, his own ancestor; who would not rather have our children proud of us, though we be not able to be proud of our ancestry .-' The next principle around which society has organ- ized itself is the principle of wealth, that which is 4 50 LIFE QUESTIONS. dominant, perhaps, in America to-day. Now I wish not to speak one word slightingly of this, but to be calmly and fairly just in my estimate of it. A man who rightfully, honorably achieves a fortune, has manifested in one department of his life, in one direction, unusual power and ability ; and he deserves the credit that belongs to masterhood wherever it is capable of manifesting itself. But remember, the power to gain and acquire wealth is only one side of a man. And when we measure him, as measure him we must, by the higher standards of manhood, we may be compelled to put him away down out of sight, beneath the feet of the man who has no sort of faculty or power to acquire wealth, because this is not the highest and grandest faculty of manhood. The man of wealth, then, to-day, has come as he should come, to be measured, not by the quantity of wealth that he may acquire, but by how he acquires it and how he uses it and when and where. That is, this simple power that he is capable of manifesting is coming to be measured by the dominant moral qual- ity of the world, and to take its rank where it belongs — something noble and true and to be honored, but not the highest, not the best. And society, when it organizes itself around this principle alone, when men arrogate to themselves superiority over their fellows, simply because they are rich, they are not to be respected by the thoughtful and the wise ; they manifest not superiority but snobbery. SOCIETY. 51 Another principle around which society is aggre- gated is that of intellectual culture. Here again is something noble, something grand, something to be honored. And this culture, this learning the truth of things, this finding out the methods of God in the heavens, in the earth ; this recovery of the wisdom, the thoughts, the purposes, the hopes, the fears of the past — these are freeing the world gradually from its superstition and leading it out of intellectual and moral slavery and cowardice into the possession of its own manhood and freedom. And yet there is something higher even than a man's brain ; and the society that organizes itself around this simply is not the best society. For character is above brains, and brain is of worth only as it contributes to and con- stitutes character. So that when little knots and coteries of people gather themselves around Plato or Shakespeare or any other man who stands for some department of the world's culture, and when they assume to themselves superiority over all the world because they have had the time and the leisure and the taste to familiarize themselves with these things they become dilettanti, that are contemptible and not to be honored. As an illustration of what I mean and how far it is sometimes carried : I was talking with one of the most prominent and best- known men of Massachusetts the other day and he told me that a lady living in Boston — I won't say 52 LIFE QUESTIONS. what quarter of it — was speaking with a friend of his the other day, and she was referring to the section of the city in which we, as she thought, were unfortunate enough to live. Speaking of somebody's proposing to get up a Chaucer class, she remarked superciHously : " A society to read Chaucer at the South End ! As though there was anybody at the South End that knew anything about Chaucer ! " I speak of this simply as illustrating the infinitesimally contemptible quality that may allay itself with merely intellectual culture ; speaking of how poor and mean a thing it is when it arrogates its supremacy in society above qualities that are nobler than itself. Then society gathers around merely the idea of amusement ; but I will not enlarge upon this. W/iat is Good Society. And now let us raise the question and answer it clearly to ourselves as to what constitutes good society. There would seem to be a great deal of mysticism and uncertainty in the answers to this question. Looking abroad over the world we see people striving here and striving there to get into this class or clique or association or circle, of which they have not the entree as yet. Some think that this is good or that is good or the other is good, that they as yet are ex- cluded from. What then is good society } It seems SOCIETY. 53 to me it is a very simple thing. What is a good man ? You do not need that I shall define him. First, a man that has character, integrity — true, pure, noble. If you can add to that culture and say character and intelligence both, all the better. The more good qualities you can add to an individual the better. There is no mysticism about answering the question as to who is a good man. Apply the same principle, then, to society. A good society is society made up of good people, — good men and good women. I know of no better definition than that. If having a skillful tailor and being gotten up in the most artistic fashion is not able to make a good man, a man that you will respect and honor and look up to, then why should an aggregation of a hundred or a thousand people faultlessly and spotlessly clothed be able to constitute good society .-" If because a man is rich he is not, therefore, necessarily a good man, how does it happen that a hundred or a thousand rich men, without regard to character, are able to consti- tute good society .-• If because a man's grandfather or some far-off ancestor was a great man, is not good and satisfactory proof that he is a good man, how does it happen that a hundred or a thousand people who had distinguished ancestry are able to constitute good society ? The principle seems to me an exceed- ingly simple one. Good society, then, is that which is made up of good people ; and there is no other 54 LIFE QUESTIONS. good society on the face of the earth, no matter what it may arrogate to itself or how grand may be its claims. T/ie Law of Social Success. Now then let us come to discuss a little the laws of social success ; the relation in which we stand to society. The principle is embodied perfectly in the golden rule : " whatsoever therefore ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." The law of social relation, then, is the law of giving and taking — of equality; the law that you must in some way pay for that which you expect to receive, and that you have no right to claim some- thing for nothing. How common it is — it is illus- trated in almost every church sociable that anybody ever attended anywhere — for some persons to take themselves away from the mass of those that have gathered — it may be from timidity or modesty, or the best motive in the world — to some out-of-the-way corner or to sit at the side of the room near the wall and make not the slightest efforts themselves to con- tribute to the welfare and comfort and joy of the evening, but to simply sit and wonder why somebody does not put himself out for their sake, to make them happy, to make them have a pleasant evening. And they go away and say the sociable was stupid, SOCIETY. 55 and it was, too, probably ; and the people, if they thought anything about them, as they retired thought that if there was nobody else there that was stupid, there was at least that one. Give and Take. Think for a moment of the principle that underlies this. You like to have somebody sing to entertain you. Somebody else, then, likes to have you sing to entertain them. You like to have someone tell an anecdote to make the evening pass pleasantly ; some- body else likes to have you tell an anecdote. You like to have somebody converse with you and thus make the evening pass pleasantly ; somebody else likes to have you converse with them. Whatever you expect, that you must endeavor to do. Suppose, for example, that we could have for once an ideal gathering ; not one single person present who had the slightest idea of being selfishly entertained by the rest, but all coming with the distinct and definite purpose to do what they could to make the evening just as pleasant as possible for everybody else. We would have the happiest body of people that anybody ever knew ; for the simple reason — and I appeal to your past experience if it is not true in every direc- tion — for the simple reason that you never in your lives forgot yourselves and attempted to contribute 56 LIFE QUESTIONS. to the comfort and pleasure of somebody else, that you did not wake up afterward to find that you had been happy, or had passed a pleasant hour or evening. This is the secret of it then. You have no more right to go into society and expect to be entertained without contributing your part to the entertainment of the rest than you have to go into a dry goods store and expect a yard of cloth or a dress pattern or ribbon without paying for it. You may not be able to pay so many things as the others ; you may not be able to pay a wide range of scholarship, ability to converse on intellectual topics ; you may not be able to contribute a song or a story ; you may feel that you lack somewhat of beauty or grace, of many of those things that fit one for social pre-eminence and display ; but all of you will bear witness to the truth when I say that some of the finest contributions that are ever made to the passing of a pleasant evening are those that come from the warm heart, the simple manners, the earnest pleasant smile of one whose social life is simply an expression of a warm, true heart, a tender and loving nature. I get tired of the literary study of things sometimes ; I get tired even of singing sometimes ; I get tired of all these special arts by which men contribute something to the wel- fare and entertainment of those about them ; but there is always a rest, a repose, a peace, a calmness, a satisfaction in meeting and conversing with a true SOCIETY. 57 man or a true woman who is simply that and nothing more. Doers and Grumblers. You have no right, then, to find fault with any society of which you are a part, or on the outskirts of which you are hanging as no more than a fringe ; you have no right to find fault with it until you have contributed to the full what you can to make it what it ought to be. And when all people have done that there will be nothing left to find fault with. I have thought sometimes of a saying I heard several years ago at the West, It applies itself perhaps to Sunday school work, to church work and to things where therje is something to be done, more distinctly and definitely than a social gathering, and yet it has its bearing here ; a saying that the world is divided into two parts — the people who do the work and the people who find fault. I have very rarely found that people who have been doing the best they can to contribute to the success of a particular movement are disposed to find fault with it when it goes wrong, because it reflects, doubtless, upon themselves. But the people who sit outside and want it made right, but will not touch it, even with their little finger, and who have nothing else to do, they can be very eloquent in finding fault with the miscarriages of others. This works sometimes seriously — and I 58 LIFE QUESTIONS. wish you would think of it — concerning our Sunday school, concerning church work, in every direction. Before you find fault with what others are doing consider whether you have contributed all that you should toward the success of that in which you are engaged. A Charity Principle, But while persons must feel that it is their fault if they do not contribute something to society and so receive something in return, on the other hand there is a charity principle, a beneficent principle, a self- sacrificing principle that ought to come in ; and those who have social ability and conversational ability, sing- ing ability, power in any way to comfort and entertain in their own way their fellow men, will feel that it is their business to pour themselves out upon those that are about them, as the sun does its light — upon the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, the just and the unjust ; thus developing and calling into ac- tivity faculties and powers on the part of others that else would have been stunted and never have found their development. Limits of Acquaintatice. As touching this matter of the law of social suc- cess, there is one other thought that I must bring in ; SOCIETY. 59 and that is the gathering of these social aggregates that we find everywhere about us. I remember when I was in a church at the West, it began a few years before I went there as a little church of twenty or thirty members ; it was like a little family, a little household ; everybody knew everybody else, and felt perfectly at home. But the church grew. Of course they wanted it to grow ; but they seemed to be un- willing: to take one of the inevitable results of this growth, and that was its getting so large that they could no longer have the little family circle where everybody would feel perfectly at home and familiar. I hear people occasionally say : " A few years ago I knew everybody in the church ; now I look over it and it seems like a strange audience ; I do not know half of them." Perfectly natural. How could you expect it to be otherwise ? Think for a moment before you find fault with the church and say that it is not social and that it is not easy to get acquainted in. If there is any one lady or gentleman in this church that should attempt to become personally ac- quainted with everybody else in it they would have to give up all their other business and devote them- selves exclusively to this. If you are not ready to pay this price then do not wonder that there are people here that you do not know. Remember that this principle of social aggregation is just as natural as the principle of crystallization in nature. 6o LIFE QUESTIONS. Chemical affinities come in in the realm of nature and bring certain peculiar kinds of qualities together, things that naturally belong together and have an affinity for each other. We find this is the law everywhere in the vegetable world, making grass here, a little shrub there, a rosebush in another place, here an oak, there an elm ; we find each according to its law. And when we come into the realm of inani- mate nature, we find it in the crystals. The world's crystals themselves, each after their own law, make themselves into this infinite variety, each beautiful after its kind. Precisely the same law must work in society. There are crystallizations, little aggregates of people that we call cliques. Is there anything wrong about cliques ? That depends upon another question as to what kind of a clique it is. If the people that get together into a little clique do it for some purely selfish purpose, or gather around some principle that in itself is evil, then that is evil. It is not because it is a clique, but because the principle of the aggregation is wrong. When people gather together and make a benevolent society, devoting themselves to the work of helping on and lifting up their fellow-men, that is a clique ; but we never think of calling it by any opprobrious epithet; we honor and admire it. You cannot wonder that people follow their own affinities. People gravitate together and find something that answers to their own natures and SOCIETY. 6 1 their own qualities ; and many times people cannot give any account why they do it. You remember the old stanza : I do not like thee, Doctor Fell, The reason why I cannot tell ; But only this I know full well, I do not like thee. Doctor Fell. That is simply the beginning and the end of it. You cannot find any fault with this principle ; at least you cannot find any fault with anybody except Him who has created human nature and made it what it is. There is only one person left in the community, so far as I know, who, according to the popular tradition and expectation, it is supposed ought to love every- body just alike : and that is the minister. But so far as my experience and observation are concerned, there has not been a case so conspicuously successful as to make us justified in believing that it will ever be fully realized. We cannot help loving one person more than another, being attracted by this one, repelled by that ; only we should dominate this whole law always by the principle of right and truth and justice towards our fellow-men. Social Obligations. There is another point. Have we any social obli- gations .-* That is, here is a man, for example, who is purely intellectual in his tastes ; who does not 62 LIFE QUESTIONS. like general society; who never wants to go into company ; he will retire by himself, he will write a book, he will study, he will pursue some selfish aim of his own. No matter what it is that takes him apart from his fellows, he chooses to live by himself. There is another type that I have in mind, that is a more beautiful illustration — the type of a woman who has found her whole love in her family ; who loves husband and children devotedly, and who has on the outer edge of this family circle simply a few personal friendships that are so close that they may be considered a part of the family itself ; who never makes a ceremonious call ; who never drives over the city in her carriage, and is glad of an opportunity for leaving a card instead of going through the disa- greeable formula of the call itself. Now have these persons, — the man or the woman — who thus with- draw themselves from society, any justification in so doing .? Do they owe anything to society ? I must answer this yes and no ; and I will try to make clear the distinction I have in mind. There is not a man of the earth, for that matter, who has the right to withdraw absolutely from their fellows. What they have, what they are, they owe to the struggle, the thought, the labor, the tears, the heart-aches, the achievements of men. Just as every coral island lifts its peaceful surface above the sea, crowned with grasses and flowers, and waving with trees, because SOCIETY. uncounted millions have sacrificed themselves, and left their remains down out of sight to be taken no note of above ; so this beautiful social life we live to-day, this intellectual life, this home life, with all its sanctity and its beauty, we owe to the fact that down out of sight, reaching away into the unfathomed abyss of the past, have been the thoughts, the sym- pathies, and the struggles, and the cares, and the trials of men our brothers, and women our sisters, that we do not even know by name. This is the ground on which this, that we call humanity, has its intellectual development, its beautiful homes, as flowers blossoming from its central stem. You have no right, then, to lead a selfish life, however beautiful it may be. But — and here let me be understood again — it may be that a man is so constituted that by retiring to the privacy of his own study and writing a book, he may do for the world more than he could do if he lived always in the world and did not produce the work to which he devotes his life. It may be, on the other hand, that the mother who builds a beautiful and ideal home, a nest for all sweet affections and noble joys, that she is thus, by showing the possibility of humanity, by showing what kind of a home can be created by devotion and love — it may well be, T say, that she may make a grander contribu- tion to the social life of the world, than by living always in society and neglecting the beautiful labor 64 LIFE QUESTIONS. of the ideal home. For, just as a star far off, belong- ing to the solar system, shines down upon and beau- tifies, and makes glad the earth, so home, withdrawn from society, far off, above all the fancy and glitter, casts its sweet and cheering influence and its inspiring example over the whole realm of society of which it is a constituent part. Yot^r Contribution. Now, then, I come to the last, and ask what we can do to contribute to the welfare and upbuilding of society. What contribution can we make to its thought ; how shall we make society better ; how shall we lift it up to make it worthy of its possibilities .'* And, in the first place, the first thing you must do is to be yourself, and to make yourself something noble and worthy ; make yourself such a man or such a woman that when you go into society you shall have added to it something of value, so that it shall be more when you are in it than when you are out of it. For, no matter what fine speeches a person may be capable of making, no matter how graceful in manner, how beautifully dressed, the contribution that you really do make to society is not primarily how you look, not primarily how you are dressed, not primarily the song you sing or the music you play. The contribution you make to society, whether you SOCIETY. gt; will or not, is primaril}'- and first of all what you are ; and you cannot help it. And if you are contracted, if you are narrow, if you are prejudiced, if you are selfish, if you are mean, then the more you go into society the more you drag it down. If you are noble, and true, and pure, then you lift it up ; and you cannot help these influences, unspoken and unseen, acting upon and mingling with all the forces that con- stitute this social life in which you are a part. Try to be something distinct and definite by yourselves ; cultivate individuality, in other words. If I were capable of writing a poem I should not take it as much of a compliment that somebody said it had a Tennysonian ring, or that, it sounded like Longfellow. If I cannot write something that shall have my own ring and sound like myself, then I do not care to write anything at all. I would not care to be the shadow of the greatest man in the world. I would rather cause a shadow of my own, if it is ever so small. If you go into society and simply make number fifty, you have added nobody to it, except another person to eat the supper and be in the way. But if you go into society and add yourself, so that people who know you feel that there is somebody else here that was not here before you came, then you have made a contri- bution to society, no matter especially as to whether it is this kind or that. Create a quality of your own ; be distinct ; think your own thoughts ; stand on your 5 56 LIFE QUESTIONS. own teet ; speak your own words, whether they seem to you as fine or as noble as those of others or not. The hope of this world is in the individuality of the members of which it is comjDOsed. I would not like to have all the flowers of the world roses even if they were ever so beautiful. I would have variety, I would have even those things by the. roadside that, because we have not learned how beautiful they are, we still call weeds. I would rather have them now and then if I wished to make a bouquet. So add your own distinct and definite contributions to society. Men and Women. And now I have a word or two that I wish to say concerning one or two of the aspects that society takes on and the influences which men and women exert. Men have immense power to tone up and elevate the society of which they are a part, and to make it tend toward the highest and best things in the women that constitute the other half of society. So long as men and women are constituted as they are it will always be one of the first thoughts in their minds, and it is right that it should be, as to whether they are pleas- ing to the other half of society. It is perfectly right and inevitable that men should desire to please women and that women should desire to please men. There could be no society otherwise. Out of this springs SOCIETT. 67 all that is most beautitul and gracious in society. And now, what do I mean by that? Where comes in the power with men ? We find a great deal of fault privately, in magazine articles and in newspapers because women spend so much time in the mere mat- ter of looks and dress. Whose fault is it that they do ? Primarily, the fault of men. Just so long as a beautiful dress counts more in society than anything else, just so long as men court the beautiful face, though it be only as Tennyson expresses it concern- ing Maud — " icily regular, splendidly null " — so long, I say, as a woman possessing merely fine clothes and a beautiful face, finds that she is able by either of these characteristics to be queen of society, to bring men to follow her as moths gather about a candle, even to bring them to her feet, just so long will women pay deference to these qualities and will lay their emphasis upon them, and you cannot wonder. Just so long as society demands that when a woman is married all the articles of her trousseau shall be displayed for the entertainment of the ladies of her acquaintance, so long as they care more about her many dresses and the cut of her train than they care about her heart or her brain, just so long will women emphasize face and dress. Those qualities which give power, success, mastery, are the ones on which the emphasis is laid by both men and women. It is perfectly natural and inevitable that it should be so. So soon as men show 68 LIFE QUESTIONS. a higher cultivation of their own higher tastes so that they can see heart and character in a plain face, so that they can see grace and life and thought and heart although it be not decked and ornamented to excess, then these higher qualities will come to the front. It is the inevitable law of natural selection ; these things come to the front and display themselves because they have the right of control in them. It is man's fault, then, and not woman's chiefly or primarily that women lay the emphasis on these merely external and superficial things. You all know what power a beautiful character and life has to sculpture the face. Some of the very plainest looking faces I have ever seen, and some of the plainest dresses, I have sat before and bowed down to, looking into the eye and listening to the voice until everything except the womanly heart and the cultivated brain were forgot- ten. Emphasize these things, then, make them of worth in the social market and they will be brought to market. Women atid Men. Now, on the other side, society will not be pure, noble and true as it ought to be until women are more inexorable than they are as yet in the demands they make upon men. If a man feels that it is dis- reputable for him to associate with a criminal woman, why should not a woman feel the same of a criminal SOCIETY. 69 man ? Until this law cuts clear down through, and is equal in its reach and power, there will be no redemp- tion of society. How is it now ? I appeal to you if I have not the right to say that if a man has a fine figure, is good-looking, has a pleasing address, if he has money, if he has social standing, the chances are a hundred to one, that he can go into almost any home and pluck the fairest, the sweetest, the purest flower of the family, although he be rotten from centre to circumference and from head to foot ? So- ciety will not be what it ought to be until this is at an end. There is one thing to be said in excuse for it. The power that succeeds in society is the power that can please. A man who has no fear, who is self- possessed, has a pleasant address, is of course able to please socially; so far it is perfectly legitimate and right. But there are men, thank God, by the thousand in the world yet who have this and something more ; and this something more must be emphasized before it will be developed. If a man who steps over the line of right were ostracised as a woman is, there would be a revolution in society in twenty years. Now, one last thought, for my time has gone. Society gathers itself around all sorts of centres, from the lowest to the highest. It may gather itself around the principle of simple amusement. That is all right as far as it goes. If it be no higher than the "light fantastic toe," if that be the ultimate end and aim of it 70 LIFE QUESTIONS. all, within proper limits, and circumscribed as it ought to be, that is perfectly right. But the heart is higher than that. Seek to bring into your social gatherings the affectional element and you have elevated it a degree ; bring into it cultivation and thought and you have elevated it another degree ; bring into it char- acter and make that supreme and you have made society not only the result of nobility, and devotion, and morality, and religion, but you have made it the mightiest power to create, to lift up and to regener- ate the world. HOW MUCH MUST I WORK AND HOW MUCH MAY I PLAY? Worki7tg and Playing, Perhaps it is hardly worth while for me to take the trouble to define what we mean by working and by playing. There is not a boy, or a girl, who practically does not understand completely what the distinction is. And yet, if we choose to analyze them for just a moment, so that we may see what we really mean, we shall find, I think, that the distinction between work- ing and playing is not a distinction in the thing done, nor in the way of doing it. It is rather a mental or an emotional distinction ; that is, a boy on a coasting expedition, sliding down hill and then hauling his sled up again after him, may be putting forth much more physical effort, really exerting himself much harder, than he would be in performing some task that has been set him by parent or teacher. But he knows perfectly well that the one is play and the other is work. If he were set to sliding down hill and hauling the sled up again after him as a task, when he did not 72 LIFE QUESTIONS. want to be engaged in that, but wanted to be doing something else, precisely the same thing which would be play under one set of circumstances becomes work in another. The distinction, then, I say, is not in the thing done ; it is not in the amount of effort expended. A prominent writer and very subtle thinker has given a definition like this ; he says that work is effort ex- pended for some ulterior object, while play is some- thing that you do just for the sake of doing it. This is true within certain limits ; but if I had time, and it were worth while, I should be able to point out to you some important exceptions. I only care, however, to note this as a matter of thought for you, and to pass on. Mans Nature. In order to find out what a man or woman ought to do, to find out what any being in heaven above or in the earth beneath ought to do, is a very simple matter so far as its essential principles are concerned. We are to find out what this being is ; the law of its nature ; and then we are to find out the circumstances in which it is placed ; the relations in which it stands. Every one knows at once, on glancing at a fish, that its life is to be in the water ; it is adapted to that life ; it is living out the law of its nature by following it. We know when we glance at a bird that its life is to be quite other than that of the fish ; it is adapted to WORK AND PLAT. 73 another element, and if compelled to follow the life of a fish it would follow it but for a moment before it would cease to be. And so we may take any of the animals, or birds, or fishes, any creature that belongs to the lower life of the world, and we shall find that the same principle will hold. Now when we come up to man what do we find ? We find that he shares a part of his nature with the fish, a part of his nature with the bird, a part of his nature with the wild animal of the forest, a part of his nature with the butterfly that only flits from flower to flower. But man has no right to be a tiger because there are uneliminated elements of the tiger in him ; a man has no right to lead the life of a butterfly because there are about him and in his nature as yet some of the elements of the life that the butterfly leads ; for the simple reason that he has other things, higher things, faculties and powers that are capable of making some- thing more, something broader, something deeper, something higher than the nature of any or all these. The law of man's life, then, is to be deter- mined by finding out what sort of a being he is, what he is capable of being, and what be is capable of becoming. And if we look for a solution to these questions we shall find that if not the law — for I shall hardly say that — we shall find at any rate that a law, and one of the most important laws of nature, is the law of labor. Man is man only by virtue of 74 LIFE QUESTIONS. labor expended. Let us look at this in two or three directions. Labor and Growth. In the first place, if you take him simply as an individual, look at the faculties of which he is com- posed. Begin with muscle, if you please. How does a man develop .'' What is the difference between a little child that as yet cannot walk, that does not know the use of its hands, that has not learned the use of its eyes, that has not learned the use of its feet — what is the difference between a child like this and a full-grown man } Primarily that which makes the difference is the effort that has been expended by the developing and the awakening of the faculties and powers of the child, through which effort, and by means of which, the child has de- veloped and grown to be a man. It is work that develops a man's arm ; it is work also that develops a man's brain, that makes the artist, that makes the musician, that makes the author, that makes the philanthropist, that makes what we call a man in any and every department of human life. Work, then, is the law of development of every one of our faculties and powers. The difference between the uneducated man and an educated one is simply work. And even genius itself, that supreme faculty WORK AND PLAT. 7S and power which is supposed to make its possessors in some sense distinguished from all of their kind ; one of the most marked geniuses of the world has said, even concerning this, that genius is chiefly the faculty of hard work ; and those productions of genius that we suppose are flashed off in a moment of inspiration, represent years of thought and toil, and even agonizing struggle. Take as one typical illustration the magnificent poem of Faust, the greatest creative work of genius probably since Shakespeare. Goethe began this poem, dreamed about it, outlined it when he was a young man, and wrote parts of it. He finished it only when he was an old man. That is, this poem is the quintessence, the outflowering of all the magnificent life, all the effort of genius of him who was, perhaps, the greatest man of the modern world. Work, then, represents the development of the individual. Work and Civilization. And then when we raise the question as to what claims to be civilization, what will be the answer } Civilization is nothing less than transformed and crystallized labor. Look at the city of Boston. Travel over the miles and miles of our pavement and think of the amount of work that has transformed the wild country that this was before the Indians 76 LIFE QUESTIONS. were driven to the West into the populous streets of our great city. Look at our magnificent buildings and think until you are weary, of laying brick upon brick, and carving out carefully, day after day, the stones that at last are lifted and fitted into the walls of our great structures. Think of the work repre- sented simply by the external life of a great city like Boston ; and then remember that this is only one of hundreds and thousands that the labor, the toil, the effort of man has lifted up all over the world. When you get inside of the buildings, then what } Go into one of the school -houses ; open a grammar or a text book on geology or astronomy. It is a very simple thing ; you can buy it, perhaps, for half a dollar or a dollar. Children learn it in a very little while. But these simple formulas, and propositions, and state- ments of fact that are given to us to-day, they represent thousands of years of toil, and struggle, and effort, and tears, and persecution, and outlawry, and death on the part of our fellow men. Civilization, then, is simply a gigantic monument erected by and to the gigantic effort and toil of men. Work and Duty. And then in another direction see how this law appeals to us. If a man have in him the heart of a man, if he have in him a sympathy that reaches out WOBK AND PLAY. 77 and takes hold of, and feels with the sorrows, and trials, and troubles of his fellow-men, if he be not deaf in the very highest department of his nature, he must feel the necessity and hear the call from every quarter, the call incessant, the cry that wails forth its moan from morning till night, and through what we call the still hours, even sends up its moan of desire, its mourning, its appeal to heaven and out towards man. The want of the world ; the suffering bodily; not only that — mentally; the heart struggles, the tragedies of life that grow out of the fact that man is only partially civilized, that he has only half learned to adjust himself to the relations in which he stands to his fellows. And then the crimes, and kin to these, weakness as yet not grown strong, that mean ignorance, that mean stress of temptation, that mean weakness trampled down by the crowd. And then higher yet, in man's spiritual nature there is a want, this grand uncompleted ideal of humanity that is not ^s yet in our life, a constant cry and appeal to his fellow for love. So that, I say, by as much as a man is a man, by as much as a woman is a woman, noble and true, by so much must man and woman both feel this everlasting call to labor, to live, to do something, to cheer one's fellows, to lift them up and to help them on. It seems to me if we will only stand for a little and think of what we owe to the world, of how much the past has wrought 78 LJFE QUESTIONS. out for us and how all the blossoming beauty of our civilization represents the soil watered by tears and blood, a rugged soil tamed by age-long effort on the part of our brothers and sisters — I say, if we will stop and think of this, we can never, for one moment, think of doubting the everlasting law of labor that is laid upon us ; the necessity to do what we can to make the world easier, not only for those that are about us to-day, but to save our children and our neighbors' children from the toil and from the strug- gle that has been needed to lift up life to its present condition. It seems to me, if one declines to do his part, that he is like one who should stand among the graves of the national cemetery at Gettysburg, and remembering that he owes his country to those that sleep, — turning to dust underneath in the shapeless mounds, — should yet be capable of betraying the country they thus have purchased for him. He who does not recognize the law of labor that binds him to his fellow and makes it a part of the first moral dut) of his life to do something to help on the world, seems to me to be a traitor to his kind. How much Labor? The law of labor, then, is so inexorable as this. But when we raise the question embodied in our topic. How much shall I labor, how much shall I O WOBK AND PLAT. 79 work ? I can give you no hard and fast definition or answer. Remember the principle and you will not go far astray. And I cannot give you that principle in any shorter words than by quoting to you that old phrase that has become proverbial, noblesse oblige — ability is obligation. That is, you are under obliga- tion to do for the world what you can. How much that is you yourself must decide. There ought to be here no room for discouragement or depression, if, as Milton said, with such profound truth in that famous sonnet of his on his blindness, They' also serve who only stand and wait. If Standing and waiting is all you can, then you serve your fellow men by standing and waiting. How many a time perhaps, we find ourselves at the opening of pathways leading this way and leading that, when we may feel obliged to hesitate and wait weeks and months, sometimes years, before we can answer the question as to what our life means. But beware that it is turned not into idleness. Remem- ber that something in the world is given to every man and every woman to do ; something that bears some relation to your fellow men ; and earnestly and diligently seek to find what that something is, and then earnestly and diligently seek to perform it. This is the law then. You are under obligation to work what you can. This depends, of course, upon 8o I^IFE QUESTIONS. health ; it depends upon natural ability ; it depends upon circumstances ; it depends upon a hundred things that no one else can lay down for you as rules or foretell. But you yourself, with conscience for a guide, with the love of God in your heart and the love of your fellow men, need not go astray practically in seeking to solve the question. P/aj/ ill NaUire. But is work all of life ? As we look over the face of nature we are impressed everywhere by traces of the playfulness, the beauty, and simple joy of the universe. We know, if we stop to think, that every- thing is moving on under the control of inexorable forces ; that the position of a cloudlet, for example, over our heads to-day, is determined by a chain of causes reaching back to infinitude ; that everything is linked together thus, and that all things work together, as Jesus said concerning God, " My Father worketh hitherto," has worked always, is working to-day, is engaged in his creation, building up the world, building up man, just as much and in precisely the same way as He has ever been. And yet, as in the spring, we lie on the grass under the trees, and watch the clouds float across the blue, there seems rest and play on the ground, and in the sky; and thus the heart of nature seems to speak to us, WOBK AND PLAY. 3 1 and the leaves seem playing with the wind, without thought of work, or trouble, or sorrow. We speak of the waves playing upon the sea-shore, and the sun- light playing upon the hill-tops, and the beautiful patter of the summer rain. All these things simply indicate that there is in nature a certain play element that rejoices in the world all about us. P/ay ill Man. And then when we look at man what do we find .-' We find not only the law of work, but I believe just as inexorable, just as necessary, just as far-reaching, the law of play. Is it natural.? Why, the first sign of life almost, the first sign of intelligence, at any rate, that you look for in the face of the new-born babe, is a smile ; and the child's nature unfolds in play at every step. And we find as we study human- ity, that from the beginning of the world, man has been a creature that has loved to amuse himself, that has loved to play just as much as he has loved to work. And what does this mean .? What is the principle .-' Anywhere, all over the world, where you find the work of man, anything that he has done, no matter what it is, whether it is good, bad or indiffer- ent, whether it is beautiful or ugly, wherever you find the work of humanity, you find simply the external expression of something that is in man. 6 82 LIFE QUESTIONS. For example, the church illustrates the religiousness of man ; the schoolhouse expresses his intellectual nature. Everything that you find expresses some- thing external that is in man, and a part of him by nature. So the theatre, for example, expresses some- thing native and natural in man, or else it would not have lived all these years and ages. P/ay and Puritanism. But because man is naturally inclined to play, per- haps you will not therefore concede that this natural impulse is right ; at any rate there is a large amount of feeling in the community still, that tends to con- demn this play-instinct, and play-element, of men. As it exists here in Boston to-day, for example — and instead of going all over the world, I will get my illustrations from home — as it exists here in Boston to-day, it is a remnant and tradition of the old Puri- tanism that settled New England. One of the fundamental principles of Puritanism seems to have been a condemnation of amusements, as such ; looking upon it as evil, as essentially evil and wrong, some- thing not to be developed, to be trained, to be guided ; but something to be crushed out. They have carried this so far that many of you can remember illustra- tions from your own homes, of how father and mother looked upon anything that seemed frivolous and light WORK AND PLAT. S$ in your characters as an evil to be pruned off, or crushed out, frowned upon, treated as though it were the creeping in of the serpent into the garden of God once more, bringing of necessity its trail of evil with it. This principle was carried so far in England, that it has become the subject of taunt or ridicule. You will remember the saying of Mr. Macauley in his essay on Puritanism, where he says the Puritans opposed and fought against bear baiting, not so much because it hurt the bears, as because it gave the people amusement. This illustrates the extent to which this principle of opposition to human nature has been carried. Puritanism fought against play, as play ; against amusement, as amusement ; because there was a devout and stern side of life. But this was not a new birth in Puritanism. It has sprung out of one of the most wide -spread philosophical theories of the world that I wish just to call your attention to, so that you may trace it. The old doc- trine of dualism, of monasticism — it has been called by many names — the doctrine that the universe is divided in halves, one half good, and one half bad ; one half the work of the good God, the other half the work of a bad God. And the amusements, the passions, the pleasures of life, have been extensively held to be the work of this bad God. The whole body was supposed to have been created by him. The material world was the work of an evil principle, 84 LIFE QUESTIONS. entrapping and ensnaring the soul, entangling it in the meshes of its materialism that it might lead it astray, pervert it and keep it from ascending to its true source, the Father in the skies. This has been, I say, one of the old philosophies of the world. Out of this kind of philosophy, as a protest against the extremes in the other direction, sprung the monastic aspect of the church. And let me say here, we have not done with Puri- tanism and monasticism. We have not done with this grand, stern, arduous principle when we have simply ridiculed or denounced it. I believe it has no meaning at the present time in Boston, or has very little mean- ing, because it is the relic of something that was once grand, that once had purpose in it, but which is now in a great measure outgrown, having no vital relation to the world. There was a grand meaning in Puri- tanism when it stood up firmly to fight against the licentiousness of King Charles' Court ; there was a grand meaning in monasticism, when it stood up and hurled its anathemas at the amphitheatre and gladiato- rial shows and habits of licentiousness of the depraved and sinking civilization of Rome. But these were special uprisings of this grand instinct of man to meet special occasions, and they do not represent that which is permanent in human nature. This play-element of man is a perfectly natural element ; and the expression of it in outside means for amuse- WORK AND PLAY. 85 ment is perfectly natural and perfectly right. We find this confirmed when we consider that even to the carrying on successfully of the grand work of life there must be mingled with it play. It is so trite a truth that I need only to refer to it, that if you keep a muscle tense and strong for any length of time it becomes so weary as to be utterly incapable of exert- ing itself even in work; just precisely as the string of a musical instrument strained and held too long becomes incapable of expressing itself in music. There must be relaxation, there must be recuperation, there must be a place for the joyous and bright side of life before even the work of life can be properly performed. T/ie Underlying Principle. We find, then, the principle that underlies the whole thing, I think, when we give utterance to this saying that there is nothing in the universe — perhaps you will hardly believe me at first, but I wish you to think of it and see if it is not true — there is nothing in the universe that is wrong of itself. Is killing a man wrong .-' That depends upon circumstances. It may be murder, it may be hero- ism. And so it makes no difference what direction you turn to, you will find that the principle will hold. There is nothing wrong in itself ; so, of course, there is no amusement that is wrong in itself. There are 86 LIFE QUESTIONS. only two ways of doing wrong. You can do wrong either by perverting faculties that are perfectly right in their natural or normal use ; or you can do wrong by excess in any direction. These two ways, so far as my thought has led me, I believe exhaust the whole question of doing wrong. You can do wrong in either of two ways, either by perversion or excess ; and there is no possibility of doing wrong in any other way. The play principle is right, and it is founded in nature. How much Play ? Now, then, how much shall I play, how much may I play .'' What is the law that shall govern us in this as a practical matter } In the first place, if what I have said already is true, you have no right, as some do, to play all the time. We cannot help having, I think, utter contempt for that man or that woman who simply goes through the world looking after something in the way of amusement. A man edu- cated, a man with money and means, who simply withdraws into himself, or else travels over the world to find something that shall please him and make him happy — I do not care if you exalt it ever so highly — if a man devotes himself to art, to literature or to anything else ; if he has no thought or care for his fellow men, if he is simply amusing himself in it, that man is contemptible ; he is only raised a little WORK AND PLAT. S? above the other man who hangs around a corner grocery, hoping that somebody will invite him in to take a drink. In both cases the man is simply trying to please himself, leading an aimless and useless life. There are many that think themselves excluded from any law of obligation if they are not engaged in something that is gross and that is frowned upon by society ; but a life that is simply play, simply amusement, is condemned by the law of human nature and the relation in which we stand to the needs and wants of our fellow men. The woman in society who simply leads a butterfly existence is condemned by the same principle. But I have not yet answered how much. The principle, it seems to me, is embodied in one word. You have the right to use amusement as recreation. Analyze that word and see what it means. Recreation, to create over gain ; to renovate ; to enliven and build up the system again when it has been exhausted. You have the right not only, but you have the duty, I believe, to amuse yourself to the extent of recreation. Work as Dissipation. But while I have said as hard things as I have con cerning the question of always playing, I am not at all sure but that there ought to be just as hard things said on the other side. While there are some that 88 LIFE QUESTIONS. lead this useless, aimless kind of life, there are hun- dreds and thousands, particularly in our New England life, that exhaust themselves and throw away the best part of their life, that practically commit suicide by neglecting the law of recreation. You have no more right to overwork yourself than you have to overplay yourself — neither work nor play is the end of life. The thing towards which we are aiming as a result is both the development of yourself and of the world; and you are under the highest possible obligation to use both work and play so as to help on this grand consummation. There are men all around us work- ing so hard that they have no family life ; working so hard that they have no social life ; working so long that they have no time to think, to look over the world and see what a wonderful place this is that we have been born into ; that have no time simply to live. They are merely cogs in a machine that turn as the wheels turn, and that wear themselves out by over- work and excess of labor. If such men would work less and play more, they would do more work in the course of their lives, they would do it better, they would help themselves, help their families and help the world more efficiently than they are likely to do at present. We have inherited a nature that tends to excess in the direction of work — this old Puritan nature that is not yet eliminated from us; and the competition of the world drives us on. And I do not WORK AND PLAT. 89 know for the life of me how you are going to carry- out the advice that I give you. I don't know how I am to obey my own advice and practise my own preaching, unless we can all of us gradually bring ourselves into a better condition. Because we are all of necessity now engaged in a battle for life, and we must work, we must keep up, we must compete or fall out. But I believe that the whole system is wrong, and that by some means or other we ought to regu- late our lives so that there shall be more of the play element introduced into them. Play then for recrea- tion. Only make in your minds, and practically carry out in your lives, a distinction between recreation and dissipation, and you will be perfectly safe in dealing with this question. Perversions. Now, let me practically apply in two or three direc- tions some of the principles that I have developed. Let me show two or three ways in which we may, as I think, do wrong in our amusements. There are two points that I wish to speak of, and those two points correspond to the two ways in which I said it was possible for us to do wrong. You can sin in your amusements, in the first place, by perverting those amusements, by mingling them with evils that are no essential part of them. For example, the theatre. The theatre is right in itself, but you know go LIFE QUESTIONS. what evil elements can creep into it, and become so much a part of it, as it is practically carried out in our city life, as to make it worthless, or worse. Take the matter of billiards — one of the most beautiful games ever invented, educating to the hand and eye, a matter of skill and nice discrimination, beautiful in itself ; but with a bar close at hand, and the element of betting introduced, it becomes degrading in its whole nature and tendency, a place and way to cor- rupt the young men of the city. The way to reform this matter is to have the amusement of billiards sep- arated and sifted from the evil that becomes connected with it. Take the billiards into your own home or into private clubs, into places where you can choose your own company, and thus control your surround- ings, and you will have lifted it out of everything that is essentially evil, and made it clean and good. So, take the matter of cards : cards frowned upon as though there was something essentially evil in them ; cards driven off into the corner, where evil people usually get out of sight ; cards made something for- bidden as a special temptation to young people, earnest and anxious as young people always are to find out what you tell them they ought not to — you can very easily make them full of danger to young men. But bring the cards into your home, let the children see that they are only pieces of pasteboard printed with certain kinds of spots upon them, that WORK AND PLAT. 91 it is simply a game in which the principles of chance and skill are combined, eliminating and taking from it everything that is evil, and it becomes a perfectly healthful and simple amusement for your homes ; and you rarely find your children seeking for it in bad places when you allow them to hav^e it in good. So, you may take dancing. Dancing in itself, the beautiful poetry of motion, as it has so many times been called ; there is nothing but beauty and grace about it ; so natural that even the soberest deacon naturally finds himself, in spite of his principles, beat- ing time with his foot to a dancing piece of music, finding his nature responding to it so that he can hardly control himself — perfectly natural and moral and right in itself, it only needs to be delivered from those things that are evil. I need not tell you what they are ; you know. Excess. And now, just a word on this other principle, the matter of excess. I think it is excessive amusement when young people, for example, go to theatre, or go to concert, or go to anything else, so many nights in the week and stay so late that they are absolutely unfit for anything the next day. If they go five nights in a week, so that when Sunday comes they cannot possibly wake up in time for church, even if they want to go, so that they have not a particle of Q2 LIFE QUESTIONS. vigor or strength left for the work of the Sunday- school, for visiting hospitals, for doing anything that indicates that they belong to a higher range of thought than that which is only fit for amusement, you know perfectly well that this is excessive and wrong. But it is not that the theatre, or the concert, or the dance is wrong, it is simply an excessive use of these things, a lack of balance and proportion in your life. And then, there is another way in which you can go to excess in these things. Excess in hours and excessive exertion tends to injure health. You know what that means, and I need not stop to enlarge upon it. You know if you will only think and be guided by reason and not by impulse, how you can avoid the evil and find the good. But there is one more excess — excessive expense, excessive outlay of money and means in connection with any kind of amusement. Remember that this is only a part of life ; and how- ever essential it may be, there are things higher and better than simple amusement ; and I feel that I am uttering the truth of God, when I say to you that you have no right to waste, as thousands do, money and means and power that might help lift up the world, simply to gratify yourself in the way of excessive pleasure. These principles, then, bear in mind, and you need not go far astray. The whole subject naturally ends where I began. Bind together at the last these loose threads of WORK AND PLAY. 93 thought at the same place where I began to unravel them ; and remember what you are, what kind of beings, what capacities lie dormant in you, what you might be if nobly and evenly developed ; and remem- ber the claims of the world upon you ; and remember that the grand end of life is to live worthily as men and women ; and that work and play are simply ministers to serve, to cleanse, to purify, to lift up and help on the manhood and the womanhood. WHAT IS THE TRUE PLACE OF INTELLECTUAL CULTURE ? My next question is, " What is the Place of Intel- lectual Culture in the True Life ? " I am aware, and would like to suggest to you at the outset, that I am undertaking in a very brief compass, to say something about a subject that is simply immense in its propor- tions. I shall hardly be able in any really exhaustive sense to enter it ; only to walk around it, to point out some of its features, to suggest some things for your thought. IV/zat is Life? The true place in life of intellectual culture. Before we can settle that, we must raise and briefly answer the question — what do we mean when we talk about life .■* Before you can answer as to what place culture bears to life, you must know what you mean by life INTELLECT. 95 itself ; that is, what is the true life. Then we can see in what relation to it intellectual culture stands. In a word the true life, as it seems to me, for man, when you look at the individual, is the cultivation of all his faculties, roundly, completely and as nobly as possi- ble. Man is an animal ; you must treat and develop his body perfectly. But he is more than that — he is an affectional being ; you must develop this side of his nature. But he is more than that — he has brain ; you must develop and cultivate his brain. He is more than that — he is a moral being; you must cul- tivate and develop him on this side of his being. He is more even than that, for the history of the world attests this one truth, that instinctively, naturally, necessarily, man being what he is, he must dream and think of higher powers and forces ; he must think of God and he must live in some relation to this ideal of God. Even if you ignore it, and think to call yourself an atheist, still that, in spite of you, is putting you into certain relations to this idea of God, as manifesting the fact that there is a religious side to your being. Man, then, is all this, and he must be developed according to that which is highest and best in him ; that is, he must make of himself as much and as nobly as he can. But man is not an individual simply. He is related to others about him. And so if he live a true life, he must not only make of himself the truest and finest and highest, but he q5 life questions. must relate himself so to his fellow-men as that he may naturally assist them in a similar development and career. The man who consciously, earnestly, sincerely seeks to lead a life like that, is leading what I call a true life. Life a Problem. Now, then, in what relation to such a life as this does what we term intellectual culture stand .-* After you have outlined your ideal, after you have decided what you wish to make of yourself, what point you wish to attain, then you have simply to place be- fore yourself this problem, one that it will take you your whole life long to solve. Life is nothing more nor less than an intellectual problem, just as much so as a question in mathematics, just as much so as a question in astronomy, just as much so as a question that a geologist attempts to solve in regard to the state of the earth, or the scientist in any direction, whatever his department may be. And there is no other question in the world so hard to solve, that you may so easily make mistakes in, and where mistakes are so important and far- reaching in their influence as they are in this. There is no question, then, but that you will need all the brain you have as an original endowment, and all the brain power that you can add by the broadest, and deepest, and highest culture. There is not, I INTELLECT. 97 say, any danger but that you will need it all in order to get the true answer to this life problem that you must, after some fashion, solve. It will not be found by accident, this true answer. The person who goes blundering into life and expects to stumble on success, may do it once in a million times, but he is almost foreordained to certain failure. As well toss up a hat full of figures, and expect them to fall at your feet in the shape of a solution of a problem in algebra, as to expect to find out the true answer to life without all the study, and care, and labor, and thought that you can bestow upon it. Engine and Compass. And yet, intellectual culture is not all of life. It is even the poorest half of it, if you are going to divide it into two parts. A man may be a noble man, pure, sweet and true in his individual life, and in relation to his fellow men, and yet have nothing of what ordina- rily is called intellectual culture. A man may be moderately successful in his business, and not have what is ordinarily called intellectual culture. And we had better have a true life, lived out by instinct, stumbled upon by accident, than to have all the intellectual culture in the world that is simply misapplied. There is no question, I suppose, that it is true that the greater part of the crime in the world 7 gS LIFE QUESTIONS. is connected with ignorance. And yet, there is nothing in the cultivation of the intellect itself, pure and simple, that will necessarily make a man virtu- ous, or honest, or pure, or true. Goethe caught that idea when he represented the intellectual mightiness and subtlety of Mephistopheles ; a man simply with a mighty brain, and no conscience, is only a humanly cultivated tiger, set loose among the defenceless and the weak in society. The one grand thing, then, the very foundation of a man, and that which is the mightiest moving force of his life, and must be, is the moral quality of his being. Take an old illustra- tion, as good for the purpose as any. You may show the relation that stands between the moral faculty and the intellectual in man by thinking of a steam- ship in mid-ocean ; an engine in the hold, is the power that moves it somewhere, that keeps it from simply drifting at the mercy of wind and wave. This power, as related to man, is always a moral power, a moral force. It is something apart from what we mean when we simply speak of brain. The motive force of life is the moral force. But what good if you have a hundred, or a thousand horse power engine in the hold of your steamer, and that is all .-' If you have no compass, if you have no helm, if you have no strong hand and clear, intelligent brain at the wheel .-* The compass, the helm, and the man at the wheel, all three combined, may fairly and correctly be repre- lyTELLECT. QQ sented by the intellectual culture of a man. The moral power will drive him — where? Somewhere; to a good place or a bad ; up and down the ocean aimlessly, to a distant port or on the rocks, just as it happens, unless there is compass, helm, and a man at the wheel. And suppose you have a compass cor- rectly adjusted ; suppose you have a helm ever so finely constructed ; suppose you have the most cultivated and skillful pilot at the wheel, then what if you have no engine, with its mighty moving power in the hold .^ you are still at the mercy of wind and wave. You need them both, then, and we must, for our purpose this morning, presuppose the existence of this moral force of a man that drives him on in some direction. Meanmg of Culture. And now let us proceed to treat of the importance of this power that guides — the intellectual culture of a man. Intellectual culture. I want to free the last of these two words from the popular abuse that has been heaped upon it, and give you a clear conception of the noble and dignified meaning that we ought always to attach to it. There are so many people in society, who, just because they can read a little smattering of poetry, or because they have learned the Greek alphabet, or because they can drum very badly on the piano, or because they can speak a little lOO I^^FE QUESTIONS. French so that nobody in Paris would ever under- stand it ; or because of something purely superficial in this direction, consider themselves cultured, and arrogate to themselves this grand and noble word ; and so the word itself comes to be brought into universal, and as to this usage, deserved contempt. What do we mean by culture ? Take the analogues of it in other directions. It is simply the old word cultivation. It means that which you add to the raw material, in any direction, by skill and labor. Take a piece of crude iron ore out of the mine, smelt it, convert it into pig iron. You have cultivated it out of a lower stage into a higher. Take your piece of pig iron and convert it into steel. By the process of culture, the application of skill and labor, you have lifted it another grade. Take your piece of steel, and manufacture with it the highest, and the finest, and the most beautiful things that can be constructed out of such material. You have cultivated it still further. Take your piece of swamp land, drain it, cut down the trees that are useless there, apply your chemicals to the soil, turn it into a field of grain, or a garden, or a bit of beautiful park. You have cultivated your land, you have applied to it the principles of culture. So in any direction precisely the same illustration will hold. And so a man cultivates his hand when he learns a trade, or when he learns to play on a oiano. He cultivates his eve when he learns to use. INTELLECT. jqi the microscope. The child cultivates the foot when he learns to walk. You cultivate any part of your body; and the brain is cultivated when you develop the raw material of that power, and make it applica- ble to the great problems and affairs of life, with which you need intellectually to deal. Intellectual culture, then, means the brain made the most of, the brain developed, the brain cultivated, blossoming, bearing its finest, sweetest, and truest fruit. Bread-winning Problem. Now, then, after you have found out, as I said a moment ago, what the true life means, it is by the power of the brain, and the brain alone, that you must solve these practical problems of life. Let us look at two or three of them and see what I mean. In the first place remember, your friends for you, or you for yourself, must settle the initial problem of your existence. The problem is, where you will plant your feet in the world, what place you will stand in, what position you will occupy, what you will attempt to do, what you will make your life work ; you must solve first, because it is the very condition of exist- ence, this problem of bread winning : and it lies at the foundation of them all. It is just because there are so many men in America, so many men in the world, that either through their own fault, or the I02 LIFE QUESTIONS. fault of society, or government, have not as yet applied to this the efforts of a cultured brain, that they do not have food. I say it is because of this, that there is such disaster in the social world, such disaster in the labor field, that there are so many tramps, paupers and criminals. These men that we call tramps, are simply the men that have tried to solve the problem of bread-winning, and have failed. They have tried to give a true answer to that ques- tion, like a boy trying to cipher out his first question in arithmetic, and they have not found the true answer. And the false answer is written in rags, and dirt, and hunger, and sorrow, and the outcast condition in which they hang on the brink, or sink into the depths of society. It needs intellectual culture, then, to settle this problem, as simple as it seems to some of us. Moral Problems. And then, next, you are faced by moral questions that you must answer. And here I wish to emphasize the huge mistake that people make concerning their consciences. It is always the intellect that ought to be cultivated ; the intellect that answers and settles questions of right and wrong. It is never the con- science, as that word is popularly used, that settles this question. You need brain, and cultivated brain, to settle it. It is no slight question. Conscience is INTELLECT. 103 simply that power in you which tells you that you ought ; it does not even attempt to answer the ques- tion, ought what? It simply says ought and ought not. It leaves you to settle the question of how to apply this sense of duty. It is prejudice, it is training, it is all sorts of things that determine the consciences of people to-day. And if I should take any one question and fling it in the midst of you, I should split you all into parties, probably, concerning it, as to whether it was right or wrong. Your conscience does not settle that question for you. It is intelli- gence that settles it; it is judgment; it is study of the past history of the world ; it is looking over the attempts that have been made to settle this question before, to find out the results, practically, among men, of certain courses of action, this way and that. The result that is good, conscience ought to approve; the result that is bad, conscience ought to disapprove. But it is intellect, and the cultured intellect, that must find out whether these things are bad or good, or whether these particular plans shall work out bad or good in society ; whether this particular drift and movement of men shall issue in light or darkness, in happiness or misery, in right or wrong. Religious Problems. And then there come up the religious questions I04 LIF^ QUESTIONS. of the world for solution. And here, again, let me echo — and I wish I could echo and re-echo it all over America — the idea that no man has any right to his religious opinions simply because he chooses to call them his. You have no right to cling to them because you love them, any more than a family that is living in a particular locality has a right to stay there be- cause they love the place, and because they have become accustomed to the house and the surround- ings, even though they have discovered that it would be at the cost of the health and life of all the children and all the friends. A man, to find out what his religion ought to be, must study, and he must think ; he must know what religious experiments have been tried, and whether they have succeeded or failed ; whether they have helped men up or helped them down. And he ought to be able to look over the world to-day and find out what are the great religious forces and movements at work. Here is a form of religion. If the principles on which it is founded and its practical power were only worked out in society, what kind of society would it make .-' Would it make men better or worse .'* Would it helja them up or down .-• I say you must, before you can answer this question of what your religious opinions ought to be, and with what religious movement you ought to cast in your lot, what religious power you ought to help on, you must be able to answer the question as to INTELLECT. loq what the religious experience of the world has been. Take, for example, the Catholic Church. Is it capable of solving the great problems of the world that face us to-day, and that will face us in the future .'* Take the Evangelical Protestant Church. Is it founded on righteousness and on truth, and if carried out to its logical conclusion will it make the world better or worse ? It is by study like this that you must settle the question as to what your religious opinions ought to be ; and you must not hold on to this opinion, or that, simply because you love it. You have no busi- ness to love that which is not for the welfare of your fellow-men. You must study and think, and so find out that which represents God's truth for to-day and to-morrow, and stand by that. Social Problems. And then there are social problems. I need not enlarge upon them to tell you what they are; they are all about us, problems that need study, that need thought. Why, good nature, a loving heart, a tender conscience, these have not the power to settle the questions of suffrage, education, poverty and crime. They stand in no sort of relation to the settlement of questions like these. When a person is simply gov- erned by impulse, by good nature, by good feeling, unless he have a clear brain and have studied, how I06 LIFE QUESTIONS. can he know what will be the probable issue of a particular action in which he engages ? He may be doing as much mischief as good. And many a time it has proved in the history of the past, that the courses of action which men have lovingly, nobly and generously entered upon have ended in disaster and evil, all for lack of intelligence, for lack of wit, and thought, and reading, and study. Political Problems. And then the same is true in regard to our political life. Most men are Republican or Democrat, or whatever it may be, just because their father was so, or because of the newspaper that they read, never looking at anything said on the other side ; or because of prejudice, or because they became one or the other twenty years ago and have not waked up to the fact that, possibly, the old problems that divided them are all worn out and foregone, and that new problems are pressing and cannot be decided in the old way. You have no right to remain Democrat or Republican beyond another election, simply be- cause you were one at the last election. These things involve problems of right and wrong, of good government, of principle, of humanity, of righteous- ness, of truth. And above and beyond all ideas of loyalty to this or that party, beyond all ideas of INTELLECT. 107 associations, of friendship, and love for names and traditions, there stands in the face of every clear- headed, honest-hearted man, the outline and image of God's truth, which is the truth of human rights and human destinies. And it is your duty to see that and watch for the lifted finger and go wherever it points, whether it be with your old traditions and old ideas or ao:ainst them. '•&'• Intelliorence Settles Them. "ti All these things, then, subordinate to the question of the true life and making up the great practical problems of the world, are questions that must be settled by intelligence, by intellectual culture, as that word is used in its broadest and deepest sense. Having, then, given this simple outline treatment, I must turn now to the second part of my subject, which concerns itself with that which is ordinarily called literature, and which is popularly regarded as almost the only thing that is meant when we speak of intellectual culture. I refer to books, to the read- ing, to the literature of the world. And here again I must only outline the grand, great thoughts that I have in mind, and that might detain me if I could only dwell upon them for an hour. Books and Memory. In the first place, on this subject of books, just try I08 LIFE QUESTIONS. to imagine for a moment the debt of the world to the books of the world ; conceive, if you can, for an instant, all the libraries of the world annihilated — every book on the face of the earth blotted out — what a world, what a life would it leave for us ! I can compare it to nothing better than to a man forty or fifty years of age, who should be suddenly, by some sort of stroke upon the brain, deprived at once of all mem- ory of his past life ; perfectly well and strong in every other respect ; a fully developed brain, standing in the midst of a great waste of years that are blank. He would not know himself ; he would not understand where he came from, what he was, or what was the tendency and drift of his life. Just as this memory of ours stands in relation to the past life behind us — to yesterday, to last year, to the friends that we have associated with, to the experience we have gone through, to the lessons we have learned, to the hard- ships we have borne, to the triumphs and failures of the past, and takes us away back to childhood and its simple plays and companionships, and sets us again on father's knee, and lets us kneel at mother's lap, and teaches us the cradle of circumstances and the kind of love in which we were wrought, and out of which we were born — just, I say, as this memory does this for the individual, so the books and litera- ture of the world stand related to the life of the grand individual, humanity, man. The literature of INTELLECT. 109 the world is the world's memory, the world's expe- rience, the world's triumphs, the world's failures. It teaches us where we came from ; it teaches us the paths we have travelled, the thoughts we have had in the world, and the tendency of those courses of thought. It teaches us the drift of things and which way we are going. Stand at St. Louis, if you please, on the banks of the Mississippi River ; and if the upper Mississippi were a perfect blank to you, if you had not the slightest idea whether it came from the north, south east or west, or how long it had been coming, you could have no possible conception of the river there, or which way it was likely to go. But if you had traced it from its source to St. Louis, then, practi- cally, you know the rest, for you have got the general trend and drift of the mighty stream and know which way it is tending. And so we, as we go back and study Egypt, and study Assyria, and study the old Sanscrit of India, the bibles of the ages, the litera- ture of the past, we find out where humanity came from ; we find out by what paths it has come, and where it stands to-day ; and we can reasonably fore- cast the future and know what humanity probably will be in the ages that are to come. Are Books Practical ? People sometimes talk about Darwin and Spencer, no LIFE QUESTIONS. the geologists, and Wallace the naturalist, these men that are studying these problems that concern the very beginning of the world, as though they were not practical, as though they did not deal with live ques- tions. Why, they are the livest questions in the world. Here is a man who has found out that in some other continent or far off land from which his ancestors came, there is a large property that pos- sibly he may inherit. Does it not mean anything to him, then, to trace his genealogy, to find out where he was born, to find out by what paths the line of descent has travelled, and whether it comes to him. Why, when Darwin and those men shall have settled some of these questions that constitute the books and literature of the present day, we shall find out where man came from, and then we shall know what he is, and what he may reasonably expect to inherit in the future. W/zai to Read. Pass rapidly from that to another point. What ought a man to read first — what books .-• In the first place, a man ought to consider the literature of the world as simply a great store-house of tools or weapons, into which he is going to equip himself for the special life that he is to lead. That is, a lawyer must read and study law ; a merchant his business ; the doctor his, and the farmer his. And so every INTELLECT. 1 1 1 man must go and equip himself. It is not the man who has read the most who is the best equipped. You may take a carpenter and let him stretch out his arms, and you may pile them full of tools, and just because he has so many of them he is utterly unfitted to do any work. When David put on the armor of Saul he found it so cumbrous and heavy that he could not wear it. He could not fight with that armor. He was too much armed. It was all well enough for Saul, but give David his sling and his little smooth stones from the brook. So a man must first arm and equip himself to do the particular work in which he is to engage. Idealising the Real. But there is another thing in which it seems to me business men lose more than they are ever aware of, and that is for lack of idealizing the business in which they are engaged. What do I mean by that ^ I mean, suppose you are a druggist, that you should not simply find out how much a particular drug costs at wholesale when you buy it, and then how much more you can get for it by the pound or by the ounce when you sell it again ; that is, merely make it a money -making business. Let the druggist read something outside of what really contributes to making money; know his business ideally; where 112 LIFE QUESTIONS. the drugs and the elements ot them come from ; what they are chemically ; where they grow ; by what process they have come to be as they are. And so the banker, the merchant in any department, and the lawyer. Read outside of that which simply can be coined into coppers, so as to enlarge upon and idealize your business and make it beautiful beyond its simple use. Time to Read. And then every man, it seems to me, should do something in his reading beyond even this. Men tell me they have no time to read. I do not like to contradict people, but I do not believe a word of it. There is not a man who has reached the age of forty or fifty years, who has not had time to read all the truly great books in the world. Suppose you read only one book a year. Take such a little book as Dana's Geological Story Briefly Told. There is not a man here who could not read it in the time that he spends over the useless parts of his newspaper in three months. And yet it opens to him a stretch of past history clear back, not only to the begin- ning of this planet, but into the distant nebulae beyond — opens up grand avenues of thought, and life, and being, that he does not dream of. I was talking with a merchant the other day, who had retired from business, and I was particularly pleased INTELLECT. 1 1 3 with one thing he told me. He said, " I don't want for resources, for I have done what most merchants, so far as my acquaintance with them is concerned, do not do. I have compelled myself always to take time to read and to think. My business has not suffered for it. And now, all this world that I have created for myself by my thinking and reading, is open to me to enter, to live in, to enjoy myself in." Just this is the reason why most merchants can never, with any comfort, retire from business. They have gone through life so absorbed in business that they simply and absolutely know nothing else, and can do nothing else. That is, they have made them- selves simply machines to perform a particular piece of work ; and if they stop doing that, they have got to stop doing everything. Be a man beyond the bread-winning ; both sides of it, all around it. I said a moment ago, and I wish to repeat it, that you can, every one of you, if you will, read all the great books of the world. If you go into a library, say of ten thousand volumes — which is only a small one — and then look at some of the great libraries that reach up into the thousands and hundreds of thou- sands, it seems an everlasting work to read anything. But the most of these books are only fragments. The great books of the world, those that let you into the grand secrets of the world's thought and life, I can count on my fingers by not going over them 8 114 LIFE QUESTIONS. more than twice. By reading one of them a year you can become acquainted with the whole of them in any ordinary business life. Mental Atmosphere. Another point : the soil that is about your house, the exhalations from it, the air you breathe and the food you eat, make you what you are physically. And so the intellectual soil in which you grow, the exhalations from it, the literary air that you breathe, the books that you read, the mental pabulum with which you fill yourself, these make you mentally and morally. Then beware that you read good books, that you eat mentally good food — that is what it means. For there are thousands of people who admit into their homes and into intimate association with the mental and moral life of their children, books of such a character, that if they should only creep out of their covers and get into coats and hats, they would be incontinently kicked into the streets. People asso- ciate in literature with that which is vile and mean and contemptible, that which is weak — which is the next worse vice in a book — where they would not think of associating with people who had a character like it. What is it that makes a good man .'' Moral qualities make a good man. It does not make a great man, because a great man needs brain and thought INTELLECT. j i 5 superadded to moral qualities. But a good book needs something beside moral character ; it needs moral character and it needs intellectual character. And it is not worth your while to waste your time over a book that has not something of power in it. A book that was not, when it was written, inspired by the life of the writer, never can inspire you. A book that does not come out of an elevated mental and moral birth cannot elevate and lift up your life. A book, then, needs to be both good and great to be worthy of your attention. It needs to be a book that has life in it, and power, and thought, and suggestion. The Society of Books. Think for a minute what grand company is open to all. I talked to you a little while ago about socie- ty. It is very difficult for us sometimes to get into what we call the best society here in Boston or New York. But think what a grand society is open to every man that chooses to enter it in the literature of the world. In your little room — no matter if it is a small room, if it is a corner in the sitting-room, if it is a little place that you dignify by the name of libra- ry, no matter if it is a fourth-story chamber and small and dingy at that — old Homer is not ashamed to come to you and sing his immortal song. You can open the door and Dante will come in, walking with Il6 LIFE QUESTIONS. that sad and downcast face and air that in his old age, after his outcast life, made the children, as they looked at him, stare and say, " There is the man that has been in hell." Goethe will come with all his wis- dom. The grave and simple Shakspeare bringing the grand train of all his imaginary creations — more real than most men in flesh and blood. Milton will open to you his grand conception of heaven and hell — a whole universe inside of two covers. Charles Lamb will sit and chat with you in his beautiful, sim- ple, loving, child -like essays. You can invite an astronomer, and while you dream your waking dream under his guidance, travel to the moon and from planet to planet, until you stand on the uttermost verge of this solar system ; and then, with one bold leap of your fancy, to the stars so far away that their light has been thousands of years in travelling to the earth ; standing thus at the centre of this vast cosmos and reading the secrets of the universe. With a geologist you may travel back and down and learn how the earth has grown. This grandest company you can keep, if you will, in books. And remember that these mental associations make you quite as much as the men and women you associate with — perhaps more. There are characters in Dickens, there are characters of the great novelists and drama- tists of the world, that are more vitally real in their power and influence over you than the men you shake INTELLECT. 117 hands with on the street. For you do not simply see their outside, you are let into the secrets of heart and brain, reading the motives that have made them what they are. Books Broaden Men. I had intended to speak of the power of books to broaden men, to bring them into sympathy with other schools and styles of thought. Why, there are people that read nothing but the Bible. Grand book, properly treated, as it is ; but until they have read other bibles, until they have studied it as a literature, and seen how it grows, and by what process it has come to be what it is, they can never understand it. It is a sealed book to them until they borrow the keys of other literatures and other religions with which to open it. Men are unjust, and bigoted, and unkind, simply for lack of this intellectual culture that shall bring them into sympathy with the thoughts of other lands and other worlds. Do you suppose we should be troubled with the Chinese question, to-day, if the ordinary people were familiar with Chinese thought and Chinese modes of life .■' What does it mean that we can be unkind and hard on this and other nations, and call them flippantly and sneer- ingly foreigners and outsiders ? It means simply that we lack sympathy for them, that we do not understand them, that we have not thought and read. jl8 I^JF^ QUESTIONS. Books as Recreation, And now for my last thought, and a brief one it must be. Use literature simply as play, when you have earned the right. There is nothing I prize so much as I do my books, outside of my duties and my human relations. When I am tired I can pick up a book and make a tour in Central Asia, in the Pacific islands, among the ice fields of the North. I can sit for a while under palm trees in tropical climes ; I can see the glance and gleam of beautiful foliage through the trees, and hear marvellous songs from birds I have never seen. Take excursions under the guidance of your books, and go off for a while out of the weary world of toil, and rest. But the one grand thing, as I said at the outset, is life; and the bearing of this problem of life on all these things is the important matter. Whatever helps you in books, or reading, or literary culture, to live a broader or nobler life, is God-sent and God- blessed. Whatever hinders or drags you down is inspired, not from above, but from below. Make all things, then, help on a true, a pure, and a noble life. SHALL I TRY TO BE RICH. Youth and Dreams. Spring is the time for dreams. The tender skies, the bursting buds, the patches of green here and there, have in them suggestions of infinite visions. If one isn't touched by it, it is because sensibility has decayed. And the morning earth and sky — how different are they from the sober, white light of noon, or the hour when twilight shadows gather ! To a full, flushing vitality, almost anything seems possible in the morning. The early morning means poetry and hope. And youth is both morning and spring in one. What wonder, then, if young men and young women dream ? Then they stand on moun- tain tops, and all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them lie spread out at their feet. Their cloudy fancies are palaces ; and to scale the heavens and find them realities seems an easy task. And who would have it otherwise .-• Let the mountain brook babble and laugh and dash itself into feathery I20 LIFE QUESTIONS. spray ; it will flow deeply and turn mill wheels quietly enough by-and-by. Every healthy, vigorous young person, when starting out into the world, though for a time pillowed on hard stones, like Jacob, is sure, like him, to dream of opening heavens, of ladders reaching to the sky, and of angels ascending and descending. It is easy enough to smile at these "great expectations." But though it is too true that most of such visions fade, yet I do not believe any one ever achieved much who did not dream of great things. Imagination lures us on, and we turn into fact as many of its bright forms as we can. An Earthly Paradise. And it is a principle true of all visions that, how- ever strange or wonderful they may be, they are all made up of combinations of common, human, earthly things. You may dream of a human -headed lion with wings ; it is a creature no one ever saw except in vision ; but we have all seen the head, the lion and the wings — the parts of which it is composed. Even the Revelator's dream of the city of God coming down out of heaven was made up of the real earthly factors of gold, and jewels, and glass, and trees, and rivers, and light. You cannot expect the young man, then, to dream of anything more ethereal or spiritual. He will dream of a paradise indeed; but if he is WEALTH. 121 healthy and human, his paradise will be on the ground, and all its glory will be constructed of earthly and human materials. Let us take our place by his side for a little as he stands on the boundary line that separates the boy from the man. He is looking up the long vista of years that seems to open almost endless reaches into the unexplored regions and possibilities of manhood. To his fancy the changing clouds of the future take on all the varying shapes of his grand ambitions. T^e Dream of Home. He sees a home. No man is naturally a vagabond. I do not believe the healthy young man ever lived whose fancy looked forward and painted on the horizon of the future, as the goal and spring of his high hopes, a bachelor boarding-house. Young men do not dream about nor get enthusiastic over empty rooms. If a man finds himself at forty a forlorn and lonely bachelor, you may be sure it was not because he planned for and intended it. Whatever may be true of those who marry, you may be quite sure there is a hidden tragedy somewhere in the history of those who do not. Nature is not thwarted with- out a cause. The young man then dreams of a home. And of course he dreams of a beautiful one. It is broad and 122 LIFE QUESTIONS. open and free. The wide floors are soft with carpets. The corners and halls and stairways are ornamented with statuary and reminiscences of far-off lands. The walls are hung with pictures. And in the midst of all, that for which it exists, and which constitutes its soul and gives it meaning, there stand wife and child, rich in their own fair beauty and the robing of beautiful garments. And as the young man gazes on his dream, he says, "To realize this, I must have money." Money is the condition of bringing his vision out of the clouds and making it rest upon the ground so that he can enter it with his material feet. Is he not justified, then, in wishing to become rich .'' I believe he is ; for I think everyone should desire and seek for as beautiful a home as he can build. T/te Dream of Position. But, looking up the dreamland vista of years, he sees another vision. It is one of the primal instincts of human nature to desire the good opinion, the esteem, the admiration of our fellow men. It fre- quently degenerates into snobbery, the wish to exult over those below us, to see them turn yellow and green with envy and jealousy and spite because of our superior good fortune. But it is healthy and noble to desire that others should think well of us ; WEALTH. 121 and to attain such a position that men will look to us for guidance, for sympathy and help. Every young man, then, naturally and rightly looks forward to the attainment of social position. And, in this country, where there is no hereditary rank, the making of money looks like the straightest and simplest way of gaining such position. He sees that the man of wealth is immediately lifted up on a pedestal of pop- ular respect and favor. And, unless he is made of finer stuff than that which constitutes the grain of our common human nature, he will strike at once for this readiest means of social ascent, without waiting long to find out if there is a better way. The Political Dream. And then there is the dream of political place and power. And, as things are to-day in our republic, he will not study the problem long before he will con- clude that money is a stronger political force than character or brains. Most official doors will open their locks at the touch of a golden key. He will see senators at Washington whose sole claim to honor and power would appear to be a Pacific Slope bonanza. And he will notice that railroad magnates can carry whole legislatures about in their pockets. Here in Massachusetts he might discover that the one man who is hungriest for the governor's chair is 124 -^-^^^ QUESTIONS. more to be feared because of his plethoric bank account than for either his tongue, his shrewdness or his learning. Is it strange, then, that his dream shows him that the foundations of his political temple are constructed of gold and precious stones ? The stairways in his vision are naturally gilded. T/ie Dream of Travel. Another dream in the hearts of us all in these days is a picture of foreign travel. The Bible has been familiar to us from childhood ; and across its fields walk saintly and heroic forms in foreign costumes and with foreign air. Strange rivers flow across its landscapes, and strange mountains lift themselves in its far-off atmosphere. Our Latin and Greek have made Athens and Rome a part of our fancy world. The myth-haunted Rhine winds through a land of poetry and romance. Paris is a fairy city to one who has never visited it. And England, to an American, is like a dream of the old home. Sometime we all think we will realize these scenes. We will really walk in these wonderlands. The "Arabian Nights" tells us of the magic tapestry, on which, if one sat and wished, he was instantly carried wherever he desired to be. Our magic tapestry is woven of yellow gold. With a gold piece in our hand, all WEALTH. 125 lands, and museums, and picture galleries, and pal- aces, fly open at our approach and give us cordial welcome. Again, then, I ask, is it any wonder that young men say to themselves, " I will seek out the path that leads to wealth ? " Go/d ^^ the Stuff that Dreams are Made of'\ And, in general, the 3'oung man's dream ot happi- ness is almost always one for the realization of which gold is a prime condition. Houses, and lands, and horses, and pictures, and works of art, and libraries, and society, and travel — even if he have no ignoble dreams — these are things that cost, and that only value can buy. And if our dreams are of education and a literary, scientific, and philanthropic career, still, again, money is sorely needed to enable one to get on toward the goal. The young man at first naturally looks outward, and only appreciates at its full value tangible things and tangible pleasures such as money is able to pro- cure. It is only later, if at all, that he enters the inner realms of thought and feeling, where the soul hides away her treasures that cannot be weighed in scales, and that cannot be measured in dollars. It is natural, then, that the temple of human happiness should appear to his dreams as gilded, and that the 126 LIFE QUESTIONS. god of happiness should seem to be Plutus, the god of wealth. Wealth a Good Thing. And — it is time for the pulpit to own it frankly — wealth is a good thing. Or, to speak with precise accuracy of thought and language, wealth in itself cannot be said to be either good or evil. It is simply force ; and, like the lightning, or the sunlight, or the ocean, it withers or nourishes, smites or runs errands for us, devastates or fertilizes accordingly as it is understood or used. If it is not good in itself, it is the condition of almost all good. It is the lever by which the race has been lifted from barbarism to civilization. So long as the race could do nothing but barely live, man was of necessity only an animal who hunted and fought for his prey, hungrily devoured it, and then, like a gorged tiger, slept. When the race began to think, and plan, and save for to-morrow, it first began to be human. And there is not a single feature of our civilization to-day that has not sprung out of money, and that does not depend on money for its continuance. Evils of Poverty. And, on the other hand, more of the crime, and sin, and sorrow of the world than I can now stay to WEALTH. 127 point out, spring, like poisonous weeds, out of the dark, tear-watered and blood-wet soil of poverty, " Blessed are the poor ? " No ; as a general thing, cursed are the poor ! So long as a man can get honest bread, he is not, in the worst sense, poor. But how many there are who cannot. How many steal for a piece of bread. How many a poor girl has sold her virtue to appease the pangs of her hunger. How much misery did Hood give pathetic utterance to in his famous " Song of the Shirt " — " O, God, that bread should be so dear, And flesh and blood so cheap ! " How many generous plans, and brilliant hopes, and noble aspirations have died in bud for lack of a little sunshine of prosperity. Of how many lives of unful- filled promise did Gray sing in his elegy when he said — " Chill penury repressed their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul." It is not an evil thing when a man has to work hard and struggle to get on ; but it is an evil, and a bitter one, when he utterly fails to get on, notwith- standing his struggle. Wealth sometimes too Dear. But, while it is true that money is not only a proper object of search, but is even a necessary 128 LIFE QUESTIONS. condition of almost all that is best in our civilization, still it is possible to buy it at too high a price. Many- things are desirable that yet one cannot afford to buy. And there are some things you cannot afford to pay, even for money. The old proverb-writer says, and says with wondrous subtlety and wisdom, " There is that scattereth and yet increaseth ; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to pov- erty." A man may pay out so large a part of his manhood for money that when he has got the money he is an exceedingly poor and small type of man. Let us, then, look at a few things that one cannot afford to pay, even for the grand prize of wealth. .End higher than Means. You cannot afford to pay the price of sacrificing the end to the means. A hill of gold, for its own sake and as an end in itself, is of no more worth than a hill of pudding- stone. Money is not a home, nor social position, nor political power, nor travel, nor art, nor science, nor good, nor happiness in any form. A hundred acres of soil are not wheat, nor corn, nor flowers, nor trees — neither a garden nor a park. It is simply the raw material, out of which these may be produced ; the condition from which these may be developed. But the land unused, uncultivated, unproducti\*e, is not WEALTH. 129 worth its taxes. , So a heap of money is not wealth, well-being, good. It is only the soil in which fine things may be made to grow ; it is the condition of infinite uses, if only one knows how to use. This, abstractly stated, is the general principle, that the further points I make will serve to illustrate. Honesty better than Money. You cannot afford to buy money at the price of honesty. A rich man is made up of two factors, though it is a popular fallacy that he can be complete with only one. A rich man is not only rich, he is also a man. But he who buys the riches at the price of his honesty has ceased to be a man, and is only rich. Is this language too strong .-' Look and see. Honesty, integrity, is the very core, heart, centre, prime princi- ple, foundation-stone of manhood. There is no man, in the true, high sense of the word, without it. What- ever high human society exists on earth exists by virtue of what there is of honesty, integrity. This is the one bond that holds the world together. Just think a moment. There is a force that we name the centripetal, that holds the world together. There is another force that we name centrifugal, that tends to fling off its parts into space. If the centripetal were not in the majority the old earth would burst like a 9 130 LIFE QUESTIONS. soap-bubble, and vanish like a wreck at sea, scatter- ing its fragments over the infinite deep. Now, the force that holds together our human world of men and women is so much of mutual trust as we have in each other's truth and honesty. Take this all away, and civilization would burst in fragments like an exploded planet. The lack of honesty is the cause of all the disorder that exists. That there is any society at all is because so large an amount of hon- esty exists ; and society advances just in proportion as the world grows in integrity. He, then, who becomes dishonest has ceased to be on the side of humanity, is an enemy of and a traitor to the race. He is not man ; he is anti-man. He has forfeited that by which the world lives : and is self-exiled from what is the noblest quality of his kind. To be a rich man, then, you must not only be rich, but be a man. And man, in its highest sense, means honesty. Do I not say well, then, when I assert that, for the sake of money, you cannot afford to pay so high a price as honesty .-• And yet, to what an awful strain of temptation is a young man submitted, when he sees money, itself, itself and alone, crowned with honor and placed on a throne of power and influence, while the man who clutches it is only a rotten-hearted shell. WEALTH. 131 Home better than Money. Another thing you cannot afford to pay for money, is home. More or less of money is needed to create an ideal home; but money alone can not do it. When you have bought a house, and furnished it richly, and put your wife and children in it, you have not necessarily created a home. A pile of roots and trunk and branches and leaves is not necessarily a tree. Order, arrangement after an ideal pattern, and then, above all, life — these are required to make a tree. So a pile of things isn't a house; it is essentially a spirit, a life. A house without a soul is not a home, any more than a body without a soul is a man ; it is only a corpse. You must put your soul, then, the sweetest flavor and essence of your life, into the house before it can be called a home. And if a body be dead, it does not put life into it to dress it out sumptuously. So a costly house and luxurious furnishings are no substi- tutes for soul in the home. But such a mistake as this — if my observation be not at fault — is not at all an uncommon one. And in another way men make a disastrous sacri- fice. Forgetting that money is only a means to the making of a home — this is one of the highest ends of every true life — they become so absorbed in 132 LIFE QUESTIONS. money-getting that they leave no time for anything like home life. As though one should lay up money for the express purpose of taking a journey, and then get so busy about getting ready as never to go. I beseech you not to turn home into a restaurant and a sleeping-bunk ; spending all your leisure somewhere else, and going home only when "all the other places are shut up." Culture better than Money. Again, heart culture and head culture are too great a price to pay for wealth. I am aware that money is a needful condition to one of these, if not to both; and yet money is not good enough to take the place of either. The end of life, for this world, is living ; and living, in any true sense of the word, includes love and thought. Living means an open and cultivated ear that can bring one into vital contact with the music, the beautiful sounds of the world; making one capable of simple, pure human joy in the murmur of sea-waves, the sough of winds in tree-tops, the bird-songs, the child-laughter, the happy-insect hum, the hurly-burly of the world's rushing life. Living means an open eye that can stop to notice the glory in sky-tints and cloud pictures, the changing sheen of waters, the color of a rose, the blush of a peach, the outline of a beautiful face, the deep heaven of a loving eye, as well as the outlines WEALTH. 133 and forms and shadings of landscapes, and mountains, and pictures, and marbles. Living means an open heart that, like an vEolian harp breathed on by the winds, is responsive to every whisper of human life or fortune, and echoes back in sympathy all the moods of human hope or fear. Living means a brain that can think ; that, unlike the moles that burrow in the ground, climbs intellectual heights, and " looks before and after;" that asks questions of the universe, that considers, and is awe-struck by the mystery of the world, that comprehends something — beyond eating and drinking — of how wonderful and infinite a thing is this universal life, of which we are a part. A Man or Three Dollars. Now all this you cannot afford to give up for a little more of money, which after all is of value only as it helps you to gain this. A friend was telling me, the other day, of an old merchant who had become a millionaire. A gentleman called on him one day, and found him in overalls and an old soiled frock rolling a cask of sugar across the floor. He expostu- lated with him for spending his time that way, now that he was so rich. But the old man replied : " Do you know you are not very wise to find fault with me for what I am doing } The fact of the matter is, you ought to know, that I don't know how to do anything 134 LIFE QUESTIONS. else, and haven't any taste for anything else. I 've just made three dollars on this barrel of sugar, and you 'd take away from me the only pleasure that is left me that I can appreciate." The old man was right. Ixt him go on rolling his sugar barrel. But, after all, isn't it a pity that a man, a son of God, living under this wondrous dome of heaven, bright with sun, curtained with clouds, pillared by moun- tains, gemmed with stars that are only lamps along avenues leading to infinity, living on this old earth, with a rock-record of millions of past years right under his feet, whose surface is covered with ruins and monuments that whisper their wonder stories of buried civilizations, that is crowded with mystery and marvel, beautiful with trees, rivers and lakes that copy the upper heavens, living in the midst of men and women by whom is played an age-long comedy of laughter, or tragedy of tears with angels for spec- tators ; isn't it an infinite pity, I say, that a man so situated, should, for the sake of a little more money, have so stunted and warped and narrowed down his life that the only thing he could be interested in should be making three dollars on a barrel of sugar .<' Young men start out in life with the purpose of getting rich with, always in mind, the after and superior purpose of happiness. But they forget to feed and sharpen the faculties and powers that can bring them into vital contact with the best things in WEALTH. 135 life ; and so at last they wake up to find they are like one who should work and save money to pay his entrance fee to a musical concert, but by the time it is saved discovers that he is deaf and cannot hear. Keep yourselves alive and fresh and open and young, and then if you get money, you will be capable of using it. Doing Good as you Go. Another thing I must hint. For the sake of saving do not sacrifice the pleasures and advantages of doing good as you go along. Thousands close their hands and pockets now, with the impression that when they get rich they shall find pleasure in doing good. But doing good is a faculty like any other that becomes weak, atrophied, palsied for lack of use. You might as well stop practising on the piano, under the impression that in a year or two, you '11 find time to give a whole month to it. In the meantime you will get out of practice and lose your power. Keep your hand and your pocket open or they will grow together so that nothing, short of death's finger, can unloose them; and that will be that loose fingered heirs may scatter the treasures you coined your heart and life to heap. Get Money, but — In conclusion then, you may rightly try to accu- 136 LIFE QUESTIONS. mulate money ; only remember it is accursed if you do it at the price of the welfare or rights of others, or of your own higher self. It is turning life topsy-turvy to sacrifice the end to the m^eans. But when a man has accumulated, let him ever be mindful that he has no right to hold it selfishly for his own amusement. He has nothing that has not been given him. His health, his brain, his special capacity, these he has inherited, they are a gift of humanity. The conditions of the world, social, politi- cal, commercial, that have enabled him to accumulate, these are a gift of humanity. All he has, then, he owes ; and the sacred duty is on him to use for the good of man. Make of your money a golden lever, with which, as best you can, to lift the world. Rank of Money-Maker. And remember, also, not to develop an over-ween- ing pride in your power as a money-maker. It is a legitimate power and an important one. But many a man who has no faculty for making money, may yet possess a power of another kind quite as manly and still more beneficent. He who can make the world think, love and live nobly ; such an one, though no money-maker or money-keeper, may still be one that the money-maker should be glad to hold up, while he does a higher and nobler work. By helping on such WEALTH. 137 men as these, you may become partakers with them of their service, and the glory of their achievements. And even though one be only able to build a simple home, and lead a quiet, simple life — if it be pure, and thoughtful, and loving, and intelligent — remember that this is the best thing earth has for us after all. Tha-t manhood is first. If money helps it, blessed be money. But if the money be absent and the manhood be there, then the money may best be spared, for — " A man 's a man for a' that." HOW HIGH IS THE RANK OF LOVE? All Saved if Love be itot Lost. Let us picture to ourselves a grand ship at sea, with all sails set, speeding happily and beautifully before the wind. Her captain, in his old age, has risked in her the accumulations of a life time. He has, beside, only his little child, the image and re- minder of her who has faded out of his arms and become a visitor only in his dreams. He is returning from a foreign country to his own home. This is the last voyage of his life. A storm comes up, the rudder is broken, and the ship blown upon the break- ers ; everything is going to pieces, his life work wrecked before his eyes. The boats are lowered, and swamped in the sea. But the captain, forgetting everything else, clasps the little fair-haired girl, which to him is more than ship, cargo, life, and all, in his arms, and flings himself into the sea, and after battling with the waves, at last drifts upon the sand, battered and bruised, but still clinging to his little LOVE. j^Q child, from whom all life seems to have departed. But using all the restoratives which his skill and experience can suggest, at last she breathes and opens her eyes again ; and although everything else has gone, do you not believe that the old man would clasp the little child to his heart, with thanksgiving to God, feeling that everything was saved, since she could look into his eyes once more ? T/i^ World-voyage. I sometimes think of this old earth as a ship, with its passengers, out sailing across an infinite deep. The word planet, as perhaps you are aware, means simply a wanderer ; because to the eyes of the first astronomers, while the stars seemed to keep their places, the planets wandered back and forth across the face of heaven. The earth, then, is a ship sailing across the deep of the upper sky, from what port we know not, to what port we can only conjecture. But we find reason to believe that there is wisdom and love at the helm ; and if indeed God has made us in his own image, if love in us is the reflection of his love, then we must believe that God, as he looks over the universe, cares comparatively little for the hulks of planets and worlds, cares very little for mountains, for continents, for oceans, for clouds, for skies, but cares most of all for the love of childish human hearts, 140 LIFE QUESTIONS. that look up to him and give thanks, however feeble and poor the expression. And we must believe that though the earth were wrecked, though it should burst out with flame some day — astronomers say it is possible — and though all should be on fire, and the rising flames should eat up the clouds and the atmosphere, and even seem to lick the stars from the surface of heaven, and there only be left ashes falling in silence in silent space, still, man — his child — and the love of the human heart would be the one thing that all the universe was for ; and if these be saved, God himself would count the universe no loss. For love is the one thing for which the universe exists, for which worlds exist, for which stars shine and planets circle about them. Love and the happiness which comes from love, is the end, the object, the crown of life. This is my theme, my proposition, which I propose to go on and illustrate. All for Love. I have talked to you a great deal, first and last, about thought, about study, about reading, about science, about laws, about all these things which make up the external part of life. And yet I have had it in my mind always, and I wish you would bear it in your mind always, that all these things are for love, these only mean love, the end and crown of all ; LOVE. 141 these are of worth only as they minister to and nourish love. If you trace back this old earth toward the fire mist, millions and millions of years ago, and follow the course of this whirling cloud of nebulae, fling- ing off ring after ring, to become planets, to circle around that, which, in after ages, shall become the centre ; trace it all down through, it has no interest for us, it could by no possibility have any interest for us, unless we knew that we were starting at the fountain head of a stream that was to bear us on to a land that was to be the abode of sentient creatures that could feel and could love ; that is the end and the only justification of it all. The laws of chemical attraction, those marvellous laws of crystal- lization, that create all the beautiful forms of the inorganic world beneath us, are of interest to us only because they are leading the world toward, and are the prophecy of, the beginning of an organization that in some degree can feel. Tke Bird's Nest. And, forgetting for a moment that man is the highest creature on earth, let us raise the question as to what is the highest form of life beneath us, that is, that which comes nearest to the heart of man ? Trace all the way up from the beginning of feeling, the least possibility of a sensation, to that which 142 LIFE QUESTIONS. comes nearest to us ; that which lives forever in the MTorld's heart of song, of poetry, of romance, of child- memory, of old age, is so simple a thing as a bird's nest. It is sung by all the poets. I remember just now two or three beautiful lines of Shelley. He has personified the earth, and represents her as a figure dancing about the sun. Making his cloud speak, he says : From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet birds, every one, When rocked to rest on their Mother's breast. As she dances about the sun. And you remember those beautiful lines of Mr. Lowell's. In that wonderful picture of Spring, he says: The little bird sits at his door in the sun, Atilt, like a blossom among the leaves. And lets his illumined being o'errun With the deluge of summer it receives. His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings, And the dumb heart within her ilutters and sings. He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest ; In the nice ear of nature, which song is the best ? A bird's nest at the door of our childhood home is the one thing, it seems to me, that represents that which is most beautiful, most poetic, most touching, most meaning in all the lower life of the world. And why have I spoken of it and pictured it thus to-day ? Because, until you reach the level of human hearts, the highest, finest, and most beautiful expression of LOVE. 143 life, and that which comes closest to the human heart, that which represents that which is central in human life, the father care, the mother brooding love, the watchfulness of the feeble callow young, the training, the tenderness in their first efforts to fly, all this comes so near to what we mean by the word home, that we substitute the one word for the other ; and the young man, poetically, beautifully, talks of building a nest for his love, when to speak prosaically he expresses the purpose of building himself a house and making it a home. Come now then to human life and see how true this is, a principle all pervasive and central in human thought and endeavor. Love in Literature. If you wish to get a permanent, age-long expres- sion of what men think, and hope, and fear, and feel, I have already told you that you must look at what the world calls its literature. Let us glance over a few specimens of that, and see the position that love occupies in the literature of the world. Go back first to old Homer ; take up his Iliad, and you find that the main-spring and motive of it is love. Love is its brightness ; and love thwarted, perverted and depraved, is the power that works its desolation ; and it is the flame of love, at last, that wraps in ruin the towers of the city of Ilium itself. And the most 144 ^^^^ QUESTIONS. beautiful picture, perhaps, in all ancient literature, is the picture of the old warrior, Hector, who with- draws from the fight, and goes into the city for a moment's release, and seeks for his wife and his little boy. The child is afraid, and shrinks and cries at the sight of the black horse -hair plume upon his helmet ; and then stooping to the tenderness of his little boy, he takes his helmet off, lays it aside, and then the little boy comes jumping and laughing to his arms, and he tosses him, plays with him a moment, gives him back to his mother, puts his helmet on again, and goes back to the field. Love is the centre of it all. Take the Odyssey : the central figure there is the faithful wife Penelope, ever true and loyal, while her husband wanders, driven by the winds and by fate all over the world for ten long years, seeking her who has been faithful to him for a generation. Come down from that time to Petrarch. The central thought of Petrarch's work is love. Take Dante : from the lowest hell up through purgatory into heaven, until the red passion of human love, purified, flames into the white heat of the divine — everywhere, the one word that binds it together and gives it meaning is this central word of the world's heart, love. Come down to the days of Shakspeare : all the grand pictures of comedy and tragedy, the personages that he has created are only beings that love and hate ; LOVE. 145 and their glory or gloom are only the brightness or shadows of human love. And so the novels of the world. When you think over those that you have read, what is it th^.t comes to mind ? It is Little Nell and her grandfather wandering on a country road, or sitting down to rest under a tree. It is this word picture of some type of human affection, which is the meaning of it all. It is no accident that you always expect to find hero and heroine, to find the meaning of any great book of the world turning on the relationship in which we stand to each other. This is the single pivot in human life, and all things in heaven and earth revolve around it of necessity — always have, do now, and always will, until human nature is radically changed. Mr. William Morris, the English poet, has written a book entitled " Love is Enough." In it he represents a great king leaving his throne and his dominions, and travelling over the world in search of a perfect love somewhere ; and when he has found it, he cares no more for his dominions or his power, but feels that love is enough to fill the meaning, to round out the beauty and be the glory of life. But even if we are not ready to concede that, you will perforce, if you study the history of the world, concede this other point, that all things else, without love, are not enough. Take the picture of such a life as Dean Swift's, the might- iest man of his time, an intellectual emperor of 10 146 LIFE QUESTIONS. thought, and yet a man whose intimate friend said was the most unhappy man on the face of the earth. And they who know the one secret of his life, know that it was simply because of a disappointed hunger of a life for a love that was never satisfied. Take such a character as Queen Elizabeth, the most con- spicuous figure in Europe during her mighty, her long, her successful reign. She studied the interests of the country, planning between conflicting parties. Catholic and Protestant. She was wise enough to know that if she cast in her lot definitely with either the one or the other, by marrying a Catholic or Prot- estant, she would shatter the kingdom into atoms. Going through life such a grand queen, she was yet heart -hungry and miserable, carrying to her grave the one sorrow and regret of her reign, that she was so situated she could not marry a subject whom she loved. Robert Browning, in one of his beautiful poems, entitled " In a Balcony," has represented a queen occupying precisely this position. Sitting on a pedestal, worshipped and feared on the part of all her subjects, and yet finding no human love ; hunger- ing for heart-satisfaction, so that she could say that if one of her halberdiers, who bows in awe and fear before her as she passed, would only fling aside his weapon and clasp her feet, she would thank him for very love ; because she desired that something should come near to her and take away this terrible icy isola- tion and lonely grandeur. LOVE. 147 Love is Life. And so if you look through the world, what will you find ? You will find, perhaps, an old man encased in his outer crust of hardness apparently, so that you would say there is not a tender fibre in his being ; and yet if you know him through and through, per- haps you will find — I believe that you will always find — that the main-spring of his activity is the love for some one living or a memory^bf one that is dead. A young man is conscious that he lives for love. A middle-aged man, however calm and cool in his exte- rior he may have become, is conscious that the one main, strong and motive force of his life is love. Then hate itself is only love turned sour. Even the miser's affection for his gold is only love, disappointed in its main outlook, and turning to something else to feed its insatiable hunger. Sentiment and Sentimentality. There is a vast difference between what we call sen- timent and sentimentality. Sentimentality is weak- ness ; it is folly ; it is love spoiled. But sentiment is the deepest and grandest part of human life, that without which all other forces become weakness and turn to nothing. You may compare sentimentality, 148 LIFE QUESTIONS. if you will, to steam in an engine as it stands in a depot — escaping, hissing, puffing — enveloping both engine and the people, and the whole building in its vapor ; making a great display of itself, but doing nothing. Sentiment is the same steam quiet, not a particle escaping, drawing a ponderous long train of cars. The sentimentality that we despise, that we sneer at, that we laugh at, is only the effervescence, the useless and foolish escape of that which, prisoned in the heart, becomes the year-long motive power of love, of self-denial, of sacrifice, of patient endeavor, of noble consecration. There are men and women who seem to live without love, who go through life alone, but it is only seeming. They do not tell the secrets of the years that are gone, the little romance of the past, that finds its only expression perhaps, in a with- ered flower between the leaves of a book, or in a lock of hair. And many and many a time these men or these women, old bachelor and old maid, if you choose to give them those names, have no human love that is apparent to-day, for the reason that the shining of that old memory is so much brighter to them than any living human form or features, that it casts them all into eclipse ; and they are secretly true to the image of beauty and glory that they carry in their inmost hearts. And the tongue that can speak a flippant or unkind word of such as these ought to be withered at its root. LOVE. i^g High- Water Mark of the World. What is it that represents the high tide of civiliza- tion ? What is it that represents the utmost achieve- ment of the world to-day ? Did you ever ask your- selves the question ? It is not standing armies and arsenals ; it is not capitol buildings, parliament houses, palaces, and city halls ; it is not our magnificent mod- ern dwellings ; it is not our courts of law and justice ; it is not our school-houses ; it is not our docks, our shipping and our commerce that circles the globe. If there should come to this planet some dweller of a heavenly orb, with a definite understanding of the condition and history of human life, wishing to find out what is the finest and noblest thing that the earth has produced, he would look for none of these things. He would look to find the quality of our human homes. The mother and her child worshipped in ancient Egypt three thousand years before Moses, just as she is wor- shipped in Catholicism to-day : the mother and her child, the mother true, and pure, and sweet, and lov- ing, and cultivated, and educated, is the highest, finest outcome of the world ; and with the child in her arms, they represent the highest results of the world's civ- ilization ; and everything else on the face of the earth simply stands for and serves that. For the sake of the mother and her child, armies are organized and I50 LIFE QUESTIONS. battles are fought ; for the sake of the mother and her child, ships are trading around the world ; for the sake of the mother and her child, courts of justice are organized and police parade and guard the safety and peace of our cities ; for the sake of the mother and her child, school-houses, colleges and universities are erected ; for the sake of the mother and her child are stores, banks and offices built ; for the sake of the mother and her child, men dig deep for treasures in the bowels of the earth. There is no activity on earth that does not exist for them, and that does not from afar, from the heavens above or the depths of the earth beneath, seek all its treasures, simply that it may lay them at her feet, simply that they may minister to her adornment, to her culture, to her happiness, to her beauty, to her peace, and to the train- ing of the little child. This is the end of all living. The century plant, you know, grows for a hundred years, gathering sustenance from the earth, from the rain, from the air, from the sunlight, one hundred years of endeavor, one hundred years of accumula- tion, only, that at the last, it may blossom out into one perfect flower. This universe of ours, from the fire-mists of millions of years agone, has existed only that at the last, not the century plant, but the millen- nium plant may blossom at last into the perfect flower of a perfect mother and a perfect child, the highest object and expression of human life. For this and LOVE. 151 this alone, do all things exist, and towards this do all things tend. Love and Patriotism. And what is patriotism ? To leave this central idea of the outcome and centre of society, and come out towards the world of affairs, what is patriotism, and what does it mean ? You remember those fa- miliar words of Scott : Breathes there a man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land 1 Whose heart within him hath not burned, As home his footsteps he hath turned. From wandering on a foreign strand ? And you remember those other familiar words — but perhaps, you have never noticed what it is that is central in them — those words that so fire the human heart : Strike ! till the last armed foe expires ; Strike ! for your altars and your fires; Strike 1 for the green graves of your sires ; God, and your native land ! In all these the central thought is simply love. Altars, fires, graves, merely outward symbols and manifestations of this central, all absorbing passion of humanity. Patriotism simply means the senti- ment of love, nothing else. Take the soldiers that followed through, or died in the war. We some- 1^2 LIFE QUESTIONS. times used to argue that this country was predestined to be one. The Mississippi river, we said, ran through it from north to south, Hnking it together. By virtue of the very configuration of its valleys, its mountain chains, and its river bottoms, it was des- tined, we said, to be one. But do you think anybody ever went to war, during those four years, on account of a calculation like that.-* Do you think anybody ever went to war because this country was the great granary, as we say, of the world, because it had such extensive forests, because it had such mighty rivers, such boundless plains, and such things as we speak of in our Fourth of July orations .-• Do you suppose anybody ever went to war for these things .•* The one thing that started them, and sustained them all through, was simply a sentiment: "This is my coun- try, and it has been insulted and threatened." Men calculated about it no more than they would calculate when they saw their mother insulted, as to whether they should spring to her defence. It was simply sentiment that led those banner-carriers of the war to take the key point of the battle, plant the flag in the soil, and stand, determined that it should either mark the place that they had won, or that it should be wrapped about them in their dying hour. Patri- otism is only a sentiment. LOVE. 1^2 Love and Morals. And so the whole wide field of the moral life of the world in all its departments. No man is truly moral who acts merely from a sense of duty or prudence. It has been well said, and very sharply, that though honesty is the best policy, yet no man is honest who is honest for that reason. Morality means not calcu- lation. No man is perfectly moral, perfectly saved in his own being, until he is so absorbed in love of that which is right, until the beauty of truth and right have captivated his soul, so that he would follow them wherever they might lead. Morality, in all its wide sweep, then, is simply a sentiment in its mighty power. Love and Religion. And now let us come to look for a moment at that still higher department of life which we call religion. There has been a wide controversy, during the past two or three years, over the question as to the domain which religion has a right to occupy. The theo- logian, speaking of religion as being the soul of society, has claimed that it has the right to occupy every intellectual department of the world. Mr. Tyndall has made himself famous in some directions, and infamous in others, because he has said that the only legitimate realm for religion to occupy is the 154 -^^-^"^ QUESTIONS. reatm of sentiment, the realm of feeling, the realm of emotion. But is not Mr, Tyndall right, when we analyze it carefully ? Can any man formulate God ? It is the Bible, itself, that asks: "Canst thou by searching find out God?" If you cannot find Him out, can you put Him into language ? There never has been a creed, expression, or outline of divinity, since the world was made, that has not belittled, and dwarfed, and deformed God. And the vital thought of the world finds itself compelled to burst all these shackles, and think of God as the spirit of life at the heart, and breathing through the movement of all things. Religion is first and essentially that which the poets express when they talk about the relation in which we stand to the sum of things that make up the universe. Religion is itself the flow and ebb of sentiment ; the kinship, the sympathy, the feeling of mystery with which men look upon the world about them. Byron gives this essential heart and idea of religion beautiful expression, in some of his verses of Childe Harold ; as when he says : Are not the mountains, waves and skies a part Of me and of my soul, as I of them ? Is not the love of these deep in my heart With a pure passion ? And again, I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me ; and to me High mountains are a feeling. LOVE. 155 And Wordsworth, in that beautiful passage where he speaks of — A sense of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. And the round ocean, and the living air. And the blue skies, and in the heart of man : A motion and a spirit that impels All living things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Here is religion for the heart, then ; it is a senti- ment that sees the face of God looking out of the sky ; that sees the order of God in the movement of the stars ; that sees the beauty of God in flowers ; that sees the love, the infinite life of God bursting up in the little tiny grass-blades over all the earth ; that looks beneath this superficial form of things. The man who has no sentiment, no religious feeling in him, is the one that Wordsworth speaks of when he says : A primrose by the river's brim, A simple primrose is to him. And it is nothing more. But to one who can feel and think, it is like that other idea that Tennyson gives such fine expression to, when he holds that little flower, plucked from a cranny of the wall, and says : If he could compre- hend that he should know both God and man. Love and Law. This is the very substance, the central idea of the 156 LIFE QUESTIONS. divine life. We do not think of the law of the relig- ious life when love is perfect, any more than we think of the law when we look at the stars. We do not learn the laws of the heavenly bodies because we find out the something of power or force that compels, that controls, that makes the stars hang where they do, or swing in the orbits which they follow. We deduce our laws from the perfect expression of the order and life of the universe. And so if men loved completely we should forget all about law. There is not an evil on the face of the earth that would not be obliterated, blotted out at once, if only men intelli- gently, perfectly, completely loved. You would for- get that there ever was a law made. There would be no need of Congress, of laws, of armies, of battles. Men would be led in the beauty of the true life by the power of a living attraction. Love and Retrospect. What, then, is the sum and substance of it all ? Take our own individual life. As we look back toward childhood — childhood means to us the love of our mother, father, sister, brother, playmate, com- panion, friend. When we say with Hood, I remember, I remember, The house where I was born — The house takes on its meaning as hallowed with LOVE: 157 the beauty that rayed out of a loving mother's face. And when we grow to be young men, we look for- ward to life with the inspiration of love, the one grand thing being that we should search over all the world, if we can, to find the other self which shall be the completion of happiness to our being. And when we get to be gray-haired and grave men, in middle age or verging toward old age, we may not talk so much about love as we once did, but it is nothing but loves that remain, that make green, and bright, and beautiful the old age ; or it is the cher- ished memories of loves that are past, for which we would not take all the whole world could give if they must be sacrificed. And when at last the end comes, and we think of the death-bed, what is it we care for then .■• Do I not speak &ut the heart of you all when I say that the only thing I care for, as I look forward to that time, is that my pathway may still be encom- passed with love ; that when I can no more give utterance to my thoughts or feelings by speech, I may still feel the love of some one pressing my hand ; that the last look of earth may be into the eyes of some one who loves me ! Love and Prospect. And beyond, over there ! They talk a good deal, sometimes, about an impersonal immortality. They 158 LIFE QUESTIONS. question whether we shall remember or know the friends that we have loved here. But I for one, am ready to say that I care for no impersonal immortal- ity ; it is words that mean nothing to me ; and I do not care for any heaven that does not mean a personal, tender, old-time love for those that have become a part and the very best part of my whole being. I do not care for heaven if it is to be purchased at the price of all those that have stood nearest to me on earth. I would not take it as a gift ; it is only an empty husk with the kernel dropped out. If this personal love is to be missed, I had rather that the place where my body is buried should be visited by some one that loves me as long as love and memory remain, weeping now and then, a tear of regret, placing a flower upon my tomb, and then be forgot- ten when love and personal love is dead. But I believe something higher and better than that. I believe in a future life, and that love is the heart and beginning of it there as it is here. We shall not be ourselves if this is taken away. Love is able to make beautiful the desert, or a lonely world in another life ; but the absence of it would blacken and darken with rust all the gold, make worthless all the precious stones, make lonely all the streets, blot out the very centre and meaning of heaven itself. One of the prettiest pictures in our modern literature is in a poem by Mr. Rosetti, where he represents a young wife LOVE. 159 who died on her marriage day, waiting for twenty long years in heaven ; watching every flight of spirits as they come from the earth to see if he is among them. And as year after year goes by, disappoint- ment follows disappointment, and she waits and waits, and he does not come ; at last she turns away in the glory and the beauty and weeps those old human earthly tears. We shall be the same, if there be a future, as we are now ; and love must abide or there will be no heaven. THE END. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below MAY 1 1 1932 JAN 2 9 ^93* AUG 3 1960 .^i. Form L-9-35m-8,'28 ■y^=s=— .:^*S= "^:5*s "V ^ BJ __lf«71___Savage_. S26 1 ^i^® i «§' ^- J]C SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY II III III! AA 000 503 366 7 -s=^ AT ANGBLE.S 'KARr