FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 HALFORD E.LUCCOCK 
 
GIFT OF 
 MICHAEL REE,SE 
 
FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS ON 
 PRACTICAL THEMES 
 
 BY 
 
 HALFORD E. LUCCOCK 
 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI 
 

 Copyright, 1916, by 
 HALFORD E. LUCCX)CK 
 
 
^- 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CBAVTBB rAoa 
 
 Foreword 5 
 
 I. Fares, Please! 7 
 
 n. Masters of Arts 12 
 
 III. Are You a Person of Distinction? 19 
 
 IV. Doorkeepers 23 
 
 V. Is God on Your Visiting List ? . . . 28 
 
 VI. Thinking in a Circle 32 
 
 VII. The Giant Thriller 37 
 
 VIII. On the Line of Discovery 43 
 
 IX. Getting into Society 48 
 
 X. The Sunny Side of Ten 54 
 
 XL A BiNET Test for Defectives 59 
 
 XIL What's the News ? 65 
 
 XIII. Three Chairs 70 
 
 XIV. How Much Are You Worth ? 75 
 
 XV. The Surprise jOf Life 80 
 
 XVI. Safety First ? 85 
 
 XVII. What Do You Expect Your Church 
 
 to Do for You? 90 
 
 3 
 
CHAFTEB 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 XIX. 
 XX. 
 
 XXI. 
 
 XXII. 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 XXV. 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 XXVII. 
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 XXIX. 
 
 XXX. 
 XXXI. 
 
 XXXII. 
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 XXXIV. 
 XXXV. 
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 XXXVII. 
 
 XXXVIII. 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAQS 
 
 What Does Your Church Ex- 
 pect OF You? 95 
 
 The Highest Heredity 99 
 
 Carried Over from Childhood 
 
 — Liabilities 104 
 
 "The Will" 110 
 
 " Dutch Courage " 115 
 
 High-Handed Tyranny 120 
 
 A Hair-Trigger Constitution. 126 
 
 The Latest Thing 131 
 
 Over the Wall 137 
 
 Clouding the Issue 143 
 
 The Fallacy of Preparation.. 149 
 The Creative Influences of 
 
 THE Church 154 
 
 Which Kingdom ? 160 
 
 "A Maxim Silencer for Old 
 
 Wheezes " 165 
 
 Pilgrim's Progress — ^Revised . . 170 
 
 Washing the Air 175 
 
 "At Your Peril ! " 180 
 
 Everything Upside Down 184 
 
 Getting All Run Down 188 
 
 " Splendid Failures " 193 
 
 Swan Songs 199 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 It is a happy book whose chapters live and 
 work together as a family of blood relatives. 
 
 This little volume cannot aspire to such 
 felicity. Its covers open on an orphan asylum 
 rather than a family. Like the inmates of an 
 Orphans' Home, its chapters are many and 
 are all small; they are dressed in but the 
 plainest workaday gingham and calico; they 
 are all waifs — picked up on widely scattered 
 lanes of observation. 
 
 Yet for a' that, they are not entirely unre- 
 lated. They are on speaking terms with one 
 another, and try, at least, to speak a common 
 language of faith and hope. They all believe 
 that life is an affair of great zest and great 
 prizes, and they share together the conviction 
 of Arthur Hugh Clough that "Life loves no 
 lookers on at his great game." 
 
 The essays are offered simply in the hope 
 that they may prove suggestive starting points 
 for thought. 
 
 Halford E. Luccock. 
 
 New Haven, Connecticut. 
 
Digitized by tine Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 witin funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.arcliive.org/details/farespleaseotlierOOIuccricli 
 
FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 The smile on the face of the conductor of 
 the 7:29 to the city every morning is a real 
 event in the daily life of scores of commuters. 
 His genial "Good morning" goes to make up 
 for the lack of sunshine on cloudy days. Yet 
 all the passengers know that behind the 
 warmth of the smile and the unfeigned cor- 
 diality of the greeting is the stern insistence 
 of "Fares, please, gentlemen!" For the 7:29 
 every day is not a charity outing; it is a pay- 
 as-you-go enterprise. 
 
 The world greets its children with a smile 
 and a sunny "Good morning," and some are so 
 entranced with the smile and the "bloom o' the 
 world" that they fail to notice with any clear- 
 ness the iron demand, "Fares, please!" A 
 recent astronomer has waxed enthusiastic over 
 the glorious free ride nature gives us in the 
 swing of the planet, hurtling through billions 
 of miles of azure sky and tinted cloud at the 
 rate of so many miles a minute. He calls it the 
 
 7 
 
xg^^:}f/:t: FAfeSS, PLEASE! 
 
 grandest roller coaster in the universe. He is 
 right when he calls it glorious. He is wrong 
 when he calls it free. 
 
 To some people the art of life largely con- 
 sists in evading the fare. Paul's noble thought, 
 "I am debtor," is still Greek to them. H. G. 
 Wells says truly that people can go through 
 life "fudging and evading and side-stepping, 
 till their first contact with elemental realities 
 is the cold sweat of their deathbed." 
 
 Some Steal a Ride. They evade the fare by 
 "riding the bumpers." They go through life as 
 "blind baggage." The world has made an in- 
 vestment in them to the extent of thousands of 
 dollars for sustenance. The State has in- 
 vested thousands more, to say nothing of life 
 and blood, in their education. For this they 
 make no return in benefits conferred. On the 
 lowest rung of the social ladder they are called 
 tramps. Higher up they are often called 
 clever. 
 
 Some Ride on a Pass. This pass is handed 
 to them by others, usually ancestors, in the 
 shape of money, position, or talent. Some one 
 else pays their way, and they accept it com- 
 placently as the proper thing. No sense of 
 debt goes with it. Fortunately, such a free 
 
FARES, PLEASE! 9 
 
 trip in a Pullman is no longer regarded as so 
 praiseworthy an achievement as it once was. 
 The inheritance tax, the income tax, the cor- 
 poration tax, each is a loud stentorian, "Fares, 
 please !" 
 
 Some Ride on a Child's Ticket. They pay 
 half fare. To the world's demand for a strong 
 man's stint of work and service they plead- 
 ingly insist that they are only twelve years 
 old and must be let off with giving to the 
 world a half portion as their share. They do 
 not ask to be carried to the skies on flowery 
 beds of ease; all they ask is to be allowed to 
 go in a perambulator. 
 
 Some Pay, These are the ones who make 
 the world morally solvent. They take no 
 delight in dodging. Their lives are lifted out 
 of triviality and insignificance by the enno- 
 bling power of a great obligation. They do 
 not attempt to discharge their debt by merely 
 becoming effective economic producers, for the 
 world is more than a granary, a machine shop, 
 a storehouse of commodities. It is a moral 
 enterprise, the scene of the kingdom of God, a 
 progressive advance in spiritual welfare. Its 
 capital and stock in trade is not reckoned in 
 pig iron and corn, but in moral purposes and 
 
10 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 spiritual ideals. For these they are debtor in 
 honor bound to add to the world's spiritual 
 resources. 
 
 How do the debits and credits lie with us? 
 There is in a Middle Western city a keen busi- 
 ness man of high probity, one of the largest 
 factors in its commercial life. He does not 
 realize that the qualities that have won him 
 success, the aggressive will, the alert mind, 
 even his honesty, are the unearned increment 
 and free gift of six generations of God-fearing 
 New England ancestry. He prattles in a half- 
 witted manner about being a self-made man. 
 For the church and the welfare movements of 
 his city he has no time. In plain language, he 
 is stealing a ride through life without paying 
 his fare. Here is another man in whose life 
 the Sunday school has played an immeasur- 
 able part. It helped to shape an impressionable 
 boy into a responsible and upright man. In 
 that institution he now takes only the most 
 nominal interest. He cheerfully leaves the 
 real work to be done by others whose youth 
 and inexperience are only partly made up for 
 by their zeal and devotion. He is trying to 
 ride on a half -fare ticket. What shall we say 
 of the multitude who owe the peace and purity 
 
FAKES, PLEASE. 11 
 
 of their homes, the whole core of their life's 
 happiness and security, to the gospel and the 
 church, and who think to cancel the obligation 
 by a few patronizing words? 
 
 What an irresistible force the church would 
 have did it not have to carry so many who 
 merely ride and do nothing else! We hear 
 much good advice about keeping out of debt. 
 Saint Paul has something better to offer. Get 
 in debt ! Give your life the impetus of a reali- 
 zation of that love so amazing, so divine that 
 the whole realm of nature could never repay it. 
 Only such an acknowledged obligation can 
 redeem our lives from tawdriness and selfish- 
 ness. "I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies 
 of God." "I am debtor to the Greeks and to 
 the Gentiles." 
 
II 
 
 MASTEES OF ARTS 
 
 Helen Keller has in her autobiography a 
 quaint observation regarding her college ex- 
 aminations at Radcliffe, which will find an 
 echo in every student's heart. "It is remark- 
 able," she says, "the number of things one 
 knows which are not in the examination 
 paper." We have all sat in the hot schoolroom 
 in June, biting the ends of our pens and star- 
 ing blankly into space, wondering by what 
 black, diabolic art the teacher, instead of ask- 
 ing for any of the thousand and one things we 
 knew perfectly, managed to pick out the small 
 dozen which by some chance we were not able 
 at the moment to recall. Nor does the wonder 
 by any means end with our formal school days. 
 The examination paper with .which we are 
 confronted in the larger school of experience 
 has the same way of skipping the things we are 
 best prepared on. Our passing grade depends 
 on the mastery of arts which the textbooks 
 hardly ever mentioned. We learn three or 
 
 12 
 
MASTERS OF ARTS 13 
 
 four languages, and have them at command, 
 only to find out that the chief examination is 
 on holding our tongue. We master three 
 sciences, and then discover that the world lays 
 nearly all its stress on the science of keeping 
 our temper and getting along with people, 
 which was never expounded to us out of the 
 book. With our heads full of history we are 
 examined on prophecy, the ability to foretell 
 the probabilities of to-morrow and act with 
 wisdom accordingly. 
 
 To win the degree of Master of the Arts of 
 Life is a far more considerable undertaking 
 than to become a Master of Science. Bulk of 
 information might fill the latter requirement, 
 but a mastery of the finest of fine arts — that 
 of living — ^is never to be achieved in some 
 study "far from the madding crowd's ignoble 
 strife," but in our contacts with people in the 
 friction of the street and market place. The 
 real demands of life which we must meet 
 resemble with far more closeness the difficult 
 achievements of a circus performer than they 
 do the studious pursuits of a library. 
 
 1. Standing on Your Head, Can you stand 
 on your head? This is a strange question, but 
 we find as we go along with the years that it 
 
14 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 counts about fifty per cent in the sum total of 
 accomplishment. When young Disraeli was 
 making his first campaign for Parliament a 
 voice in the audience called out, "We know 
 what the Whig candidate is standing on, and 
 what the Tory candidate is standing on, but 
 what are you standing on?" "I'm standing 
 on my head,'' was his ready reply. In the 
 eddies and cross-currents of modern life a 
 clear head is the only secure standing ground. 
 What distinguishes a lawyer of the first rank 
 from the average one is the ability to dis- 
 entangle from all the facts the essential point 
 on which the case will turn, and carry it on 
 that point. It was said of Rufus Choate that 
 he had an "instinct for the artery." In like 
 manner we need to be able to distinguish those 
 courses which are thoroughfares to a goal 
 worth reaching from those inviting paths 
 which are only blind alleys. We stand on our 
 head when we are not swung about by the 
 gusts of passion, but can think things through 
 to their final and logical outcome. The effect 
 of city life has been well described as "a 
 deliberate rush at every one of the five senses." 
 It is a rush at the mind as well. Specious and 
 plausible views of life demand our suffrage 
 
MASTERS OF ARTS 15 
 
 under the terms of what Emerson said was 
 Margaret Fuller's slogan — "I don't know 
 where I'm going — Follow me!" Paul num- 
 bered this among the indispensable arts. "In 
 mind be men." "Be no more children, tossed 
 to and fro, carried about with every wind of 
 doctrine." Jesus continually threw men back 
 on themselves by his question, "How does it 
 seem to you?" It is a worthy ambition for a 
 person to want to stand on his own feet. But 
 that is only part of the battle. The larger 
 half is to "stand on his own head." 
 
 2. Walking the Tight Rope. A rare degree 
 of physical skill is required in a man to keep 
 himself moving along one small wire, holding 
 his balance against the forces that would pull 
 him to one side or the other. But the question 
 whether we can walk the tight rope, hold our- 
 selves in concentration along one line against 
 distracting forces, is a cardinal one in life's 
 test. Saint Paul mastered it — "This one thing 
 I do." Thomas A. Edison did it, working for 
 almost two years, sometimes sixteen hours a 
 day, to make the first phonograph record the 
 sound "sh." It is a large part of every notable 
 career. Noah Webster worked thirty-six years 
 on his Dictionary; Bancroft, twenty-six years 
 
16 PARES, PLEASE! 
 
 on his History of the United States; Gibbon 
 twenty years on The Decline and Fall of the 
 Roman Empire; Michael Angelo took seven 
 years to paint the Sistine Ohapel ceDing; 
 Titian worked seven years on the Last Supper, 
 and Da Vinci four years on the head of Mona 
 Lisa. 
 
 And what shall we say of Victor Hugo, who, 
 when he was writing Notre Dame, sent all his 
 clothing out of the house lest he be tempted 
 to go out? or Thackeray, whose Vanity Fair 
 was refused ten times? or, rising to a higher 
 realm, of Robert Morrison and Henry Martyn, 
 who worked heart-breaking years in China and 
 India without a single convert? The measure 
 of a man's soul is his ability to disregard the 
 hindrances and concentrate his energy on the 
 achievement; to put aside the accidents of a 
 relation, a work, or opportunity and grasp the 
 reality and hold to it. 
 
 3. Building the Human Pyramid, This is 
 a fine thing to see in a gymnasium or on the 
 playgrounds. A number of men are standing 
 in a haphazard group. Suddenly the whistle 
 blows and each man falls into his place in 
 adjustment with the others, and in a few sec- 
 onds the unorganized mass becomes a sym- 
 
MASTERS OP ARTS 17 
 
 metrical living pyramid. But it is a much 
 finer thing to see in the lives of people built 
 into the achievement of some common good. 
 It is a truth that we fully learn only by ex- 
 perience, that our net contribution to the 
 world's good depends rather less on our indi- 
 vidual endowment of genius or talent than on 
 our ability to get along with folks, to hold our 
 individual preferments in subordination to the 
 larger purpose, and to endure even the harsh 
 asperities of others for the sake of some shin- 
 ing goal to be reached only through coopera- 
 tion. It is easy enough to go along forcing 
 others to adjust themselves to our moods, 
 absolving ourselves by the reflection, "I am a 
 plain, blunt man." When told that he must 
 sit next a certain bishop at a dinner party, 
 Henry Luttrell said, "I do not mix well with 
 the Dean, but I should positively effervesce 
 with the bishop." It is much easier to ^^effer- 
 vesce" with uncongenial persons than to 
 adjust ourselves to them in cooperative service. 
 Lincoln never better illustrated that fine art of 
 subordination of self by which he towered to 
 greatness than in his saying, "I would hold 
 McClellan's horse if it would bring us a vic- 
 tory." For the sake of national unity, Von 
 
18 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 Moltke, a naturally impulsive man, "could 
 hold his tongue in seven languages." It was 
 the fine art of Jesus, who for the joy that was 
 set before him, endured the cross, despising the 
 shame. 
 
 Verily, art is long. Our hope would be 
 small without the resources of the Head Mas- 
 ter. We are not dependent on the teaching of 
 formal precept, but ours is that same divine 
 curriculum of companionship through which 
 the impulsive Peter was graduated to a mag- 
 nificent stability and the narrow and bigoted 
 Paul became a living epistle of love. 
 
Ill 
 
 ARE YOU A PERSON OF DISTINCTION? 
 
 Are you listed in Who's Who? No? Then 
 you can hardly be a person of distinction, for 
 the advertisement claims it to be a biograph- 
 ical dictionary of the "distinguished persons" 
 in the United States. 
 
 We do not like the invidious classification. 
 It is artificial. Yet it is widely used by college 
 authorities as a sort of rough index of success. 
 To be listed in Who's Who in America is con- 
 crete evidence that you have "arrived." On 
 the basis of this book, to go to college is to 
 increase your chances of "arriving" by one 
 thousand per cent. 
 
 It has a certain real value in stating in 
 graphic terms the advantage education gives 
 for achievement in life. Yet when one con- 
 siders what real distinction in life must be, 
 how outward and mechanical such a basis is ! 
 Carlyle rightly protests that we pay too much 
 attention to a person's outward trappings. We 
 bow profoundly and say, "Good morning, 
 
 19 
 
20 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 Clothes," "Good morning, Medals," when what 
 we ought to recognize and honor is the thing 
 beneath and say, "Good morning, Soul." 
 
 The rank is but the guinea stamp, 
 The man's the gowd for a* that. 
 
 A man coming out from a banquet recently 
 said to a companion, "Do you know that there 
 was represented at that banquet wealth to the 
 amount of about thirty million dollars?" 
 "Yes," was the ready answer, "and conversa- 
 tion to the amount of about thirty cents." The 
 distinction was all on the outside. 
 
 What are the final and valid marks of a 
 person of real distinction? Laying aside such 
 things as certificates of deposit, membership 
 in clubs, college degrees, and dress suits — be- 
 cause, like the celebrated "flowers that bloom 
 in the spring," they have nothing to do with 
 the case — what remains? Can we find a more 
 ready and serviceable gauge than the one 
 Henry van Dyke has given : 
 
 Four things a man must learn to do 
 If he would keep his record true: 
 To think without confusion clearly. 
 To love his fellow men sincerely. 
 To act from honest motives purely, 
 And trust in God and heaven securely. 
 
A PERSON OF DISTINCTION? 21 
 
 1. ^^To think without confusion clearly,'^ 
 Surely, this would make one distinguished in 
 any company. Most men bolt their opinions 
 as they do their food. Their ideas are as much 
 prepared and predigested as their breakfast 
 food. The newspaper, the popular catchword, 
 the shopworn proverb — these become so 
 readily our substitutes for mental self-direc- 
 tion. President Wilson said recently, "As 
 never before, we are living in a confused 
 world." Moral issues are clouded. The person 
 who thinks at second- or third-hand gets easily 
 lost. To have a clear personal grasp of the 
 principles of Jesus, to know their meaning in 
 terms of the day's work and problems, to be 
 able to separate the kernel from the husk of 
 truth — here is distinction! 
 
 2. ^^To love your fellow man sincerely/' 
 There are four ways of loving our fellow men. 
 Three of them are very easy. One is the hazy 
 way, very popular. It gives a certain emo- 
 tional satisfaction to cherish a vague and airy 
 sentimentalism about men. It prompts to no 
 action. It lays no cross on one's life. It does 
 not deal in concrete people ; it prates airily of 
 ^^humanity.'' Another is the interested way, 
 to love those whom it pays to cultivate. An- 
 
22 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 other is to spend the whole of one's affection 
 within the charmed circle of kindred and con- 
 genial spirits. Christian love is not any of 
 these. It comes from a belief in men's worth ; 
 is built on their needs. The "interesting" man 
 to Jesus was the man in need, not, as is so 
 often the case with us, the talented, the clever, 
 the congenial. To love sincerely is to find all 
 need interesting. 
 
 3. ''To act from honest motives purely/' 
 That means to be convinced that God cares 
 most of all for the quality of the inner life; 
 to know, as Maltbie Babcock put it, "To be 
 faithless is to fail, whatever the apparent suc- 
 cess of earth ; to be faithful is to succeed, what- 
 ever the apparent failure of earth." 
 
 4. "To trust in God and heaven securely J' 
 "If you believe in God," wrote Robert Louis 
 Stevenson, "where is there any room for 
 terror? If you are sure that God, in the long 
 run, means kindness to you, you should be 
 happy." 
 
 There is only one Who's Who in America 
 that signifies. It is the Lamb's Book of Life. 
 
IV 
 DOORKEEPERS 
 
 "The church needs a few ushers, but we 
 can't all ^ush' ; there is room for about a dozen 
 deacons, but we can't all of us ^deac' What 
 shall the rest of us do?" 
 
 So ran the perplexed query of a layman dur- 
 ing the Men and Religion Movement. 
 
 Why not be doorkeepers? 
 
 We think of the confession of David, "I had 
 rather be a doorkeeper in the house of the 
 Lord than to dwell in the tents of wickedness," 
 as a beautiful statement of the truth that 
 even the lowest place in the service of God 
 ranks higher than any station outside of it. 
 But when we think of what the function of 
 the doors of the church really is, in the largest 
 sense, the office of doorkeeper, instead of being 
 a minor and incidental one, looms large. 
 
 The final problem of a church is not one of 
 finances or even of audiences. It has to do 
 with doors. It is the problem of keeping its 
 doors swinging inward, so that it may receive 
 and grow; and swinging outward, so that it 
 may give forth in ministry. 
 
 23 
 
24 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 Some church doors do not swing at all. 
 Their motto is "Statu Quo." New faces in the 
 pew, new names on the roll, new tasks laid 
 upon the heart — these come only like the rare 
 visits of Halley's comet. They frequently 
 speak of holding their own, sweetly oblivious 
 of the fact that in the realm of living things 
 there is not to be found such a preposterous 
 anomaly as anything merely holding its own. 
 
 Some church doors swing only inward. 
 They do not truly represent One who came not 
 to be ministered unto but to minister. They 
 are centripetal forces in a community — draw- 
 ing to themselves. They are rarely ever con- 
 sciously selfish, but lack vision. Very insidi- 
 ously the achievement of a church's maintain- 
 ing itself in health becomes an end in itself. 
 
 The doors of a church must be kept open 
 so that the wind, the breath, the Spirit of God 
 may fill it. Frequently we enter a church 
 building which has been closed for a week and 
 sense the mustiness and heaviness of the air. 
 What a tonic it is to fling wide the door so 
 that a fresh breeze may vitalize the atmos- 
 phere ! Now, in the conduct of worship there 
 abideth these three — art, music, and air; but 
 the greatest of these is air. A minister paused 
 
DOORKEEPERS 25 
 
 in a service once, saying, "We will now con- 
 tinue the worship of God by opening the win- 
 dows." He was not irreverent. In that case 
 it was the indispensable condition of worship. 
 Chrysostom himself is no match for carbon 
 dioxide. 
 
 The same truth lights our way as we go on 
 in our thought from the church as a building 
 to the church as a fellowship of believers. The 
 people who cannot be spared are those whose 
 spirit, prayers, and eager sympathies are door- 
 ways through which that breath of God which 
 swept over the hearts of men at Pentecost and 
 touched them into life may find access to men. 
 Such people create a spiritual climate, free 
 from the nipping frost of cant and warm with 
 sincerity, in which it is as normal and natural 
 for a soul to open out to God as it is for a 
 valley to blossom under the breath of June. 
 It is a very easy thing for a minister to say 
 from the pulpit, "The doors of the church are 
 now open." Whether it is true or not is quite 
 another thing. That depends on the door- 
 keepers. 
 
 It is a work of eternal vigilance to keep the 
 doors of the church open to the sounds of the 
 world's need and pain. The president of the 
 
26 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 'N'ew York Society for the Prevention of Un- 
 necessary Noise has had constructed in her 
 residence on Riverside Drive a sound-proof 
 room. Below in the streets is the ceaseless jar 
 of the world's life. Still below that is the 
 shriek and rumble of the railroad trafl&c on the 
 water level. But into that sound-proof room 
 no wrangling note of turmoil ever penetrates. 
 It is a sobering thought that the church may 
 easily become such a sound-proof room, admit- 
 ting into its confines of quietness and content 
 no disturbing reminders of the world's aching 
 heart and sin. "Peace, Perfect Peace," may 
 be its only anthem, so that it forgets to turn 
 over the page to the less sedative strains of 
 "Rescue the Perishing." God never speaks so 
 directly to his church as through the deep- 
 throated voice of the world's misery, and every 
 member who by his sympathies enables the 
 church to continually hear the "still, sad 
 music of humanity," lays upon its heart the 
 restless urge which the fellowship of his 
 sufferings brings. 
 
 Open my heart to music; let 
 
 Me thrill with spring's first lutes and drums; 
 But never let me dare forget 
 
 The bitter ballads of the slums. 
 
DOORKEEPERS 27 
 
 A doorkeeper lets the doors of the church 
 swing outward, so that lives which have felt 
 the impression of the Master's Spirit may go 
 out to expression in his service. After the first 
 sermon at Capernaum Jesus "went from the 
 synagogue into the house" — there to carry the 
 truth he had himself spoken, through the heal- 
 ing hand on the fevered brow. Through doors 
 that swing outward the church emerges to 
 sacrificial activity, "the creed of creeds, the 
 ministry of loving deeds." 
 
IS GOD ON YOUR VISITING LIST? 
 
 A RECENT novelist has eloquently described 
 the religion of one of his characters in the 
 sentence, "She had God on her visiting list." 
 
 Nothing could be added by enlarging on the 
 theme for a whole chapter. It aptly describes, 
 not only that particular woman, but also 
 the widespread formal, polite conventionality 
 which so often masquerades as religion. It 
 reminds us of the statement in the obituary 
 notice of an English squire: "He was not in- 
 terested in religion, but in all other respects 
 he was a consistent Protestant," 
 
 A great many people have God on their 
 visiting list. Their relation to their Creator 
 is polite and respectful. It adheres to the lines 
 of good form. It is sustained with about the 
 same warmth and from something of the same 
 motives that one keeps in touch with a rich 
 uncle from whom he has distant expectations. 
 It is this attitude which gave rise to the 
 observation that many people took their Chris- 
 tianity like vaccination for smallpox, taking 
 
 28 
 
IS GOD ON YOUR VISITING LIST? 29 
 
 just enough to prevent them from catching the 
 disease. 
 
 The social forms by which many people pay 
 their religious duty are varied. 
 
 1. The Occasional Call, It is bad form to 
 neglect one's calling list. Smith aims to call 
 on Jones every so often ; he does not want to let 
 Cousin George, who is a little sensitive, and 
 to whom it pays to show attention, feel that 
 he is forgotten. So he calls there. Likewise 
 he goes to church on Easter and Christmas, 
 perhaps also on Children's Day. Or he goes 
 with the lodge to the Memorial Service and 
 lives in a glow of righteous exaltation for six 
 months. In a very different sense from the 
 prophet Elijah, "In the strength of that meat 
 he goes forty days." 
 
 2. The Week-End Visit. This is popular as 
 a religious as well as a social institution. The 
 rest of the week need not take its cue too 
 slavishly from Sunday. The week-end visit at 
 church concludes; "To-morrow to new fields 
 and pastures new." As the somewhat terrible 
 cynicism of Bliss Carman's poem, "Grass," puts 
 it: 
 
 They're praising God on Sunday, 
 They'll be all right on Monday, 
 It's just a little habit they've acquired. 
 
30 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 A couple came to a Chicago minister to be 
 married. The groom asked if it would be 
 proper for them to kneel down and pray, and 
 on being told that it would be very fitting, 
 inquired how long they should pray. "O, that 
 is for you to judge," said the minister, "just 
 a short prayer." Then the groom had a sud- 
 den inspiration. "I'll kneel down and count 
 twelve," he said. We smile, and yet that is a 
 very common idea of prayer — kneeling down 
 and counting twelve, or pronouncing other 
 words equally meaningful ; just going through 
 the motions. It bears the same relation to real 
 worship that slipping your calling card under 
 the door bears to communion with a friend. 
 
 3. The Annual Visit. This has its vogue. 
 It frequently comes in Lent. It is a regular 
 affair, just as the children go out to Aunt 
 Mary's for two weeks every summer. It is a 
 good thing, for frequently such a concentra- 
 tion of religious thought and practice is a tide 
 which taken at the flood leads on to spiritual 
 fortune. The trouble is that so often after 
 the flood recedes the beach is left totally high 
 and dry. After Easter we take the decorations 
 down. We stack up the gilded lettering, "He 
 is Risen," away behind the coal bin in the 
 
IS GOD ON YOUR VISITING LIST? 31 
 
 church cellar, to be used next year perhaps. A 
 sad symbol of the treatment accorded the 
 Easter truth. The living truth, "He is risen,'' 
 is frequently dismantled and tucked away in 
 an unused corner of the mind. 
 
 4. The Sick Call This call is all that God 
 ever receives from some. Too busy in health, 
 he is on their visiting list only in affliction. 
 Then "they call upon the Lord in their 
 trouble." What a ghastly relation to him 
 whose mercies are new every morning and who 
 would daily bear our burden ! 
 
 Jesus said, "Abide in me." He did not say, 
 "Visit me occasionally." We abide when we 
 do all things as unto him, squared with his 
 purpose, directed by his Spirit. When we 
 abide we rejoice. "If ye abide, ... ye shall 
 ask . . . and it shall be done." When we 
 abide we bear fruit. "He that abideth in me, 
 the same beareth much fruit." 
 
VI 
 
 THINKING IN A CIRCLE 
 
 Dr. Richard C. Cabot^ in that amazingly 
 suggestive book, What Men Live By, describes 
 with a fine insight a common mental process 
 which easily tends to become a fixed habit 
 nnless it is checked. He calls it "thinking in 
 a circle'' and gives a very convincing diagram 
 and illustration which holds the mirror up to 
 our own nature. Here is the way the merry- 
 go-round in a man's mind frequently runs: 
 "(1) I must find some work; (2) Am I fit for 
 any? (3) How lonely it is to be one of the 
 unfit! (4) This loneliness is killing me. (5) 
 I can't stand it, so ( 1 ) I must find some work," 
 etc. Thus the mind runs around the dizzy 
 circle. 
 
 "Vacillation," he says, "has the same circu- 
 lar character or pendulous swing." Here is 
 the inside working of another piece of mental 
 machinery: "(1) I guess I'll buy some stock 
 
 32 
 
THINKING IN A CIRCLE 33 
 
 at once, but (2) the price may fall. (3) I 
 guess it's safer not to buy now. (4) But 
 there is a splendid chance to get rich if I 
 buy now, so (1) I guess I'll buy some stock," 
 etc. 
 
 "Break away! Think straight in some 
 direction !" This advice, we all recognize, is a 
 big improvement on endless swinging around 
 the circle. But how to do it — there lies the 
 rub ! General Robert E. Lee had often to face 
 the problem in the concrete form in which it 
 comes to all of us. After long hours of work- 
 ing on the details of some piece of military 
 strategy, he would often seek out Longstreet 
 and say : "I need a tangent. My mind has got 
 to working in a circle." In the counsel of that 
 alert and friendly mind he found the tangent 
 that led him straight to some decision. 
 
 A wise friend may often serve as a needed 
 tangent. "Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man 
 sharpeneth the countenance of his friend." 
 But there is a Friend who sticketh closer than 
 a brother, with whom the ultimate solution of 
 the problem lies. 
 
 Worry does its greatest damage through the 
 vicious character of its circular swing. It 
 accomplishes nothing but the breaking down 
 
34 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 of the brain cells and the dimming of the 
 native hue of resolution of the spirit. "It's 
 not the jumping hurdles that hurts the horses' 
 feet," said a wise stable groom. "It's the 
 hammer, hammer, hammer on the hard high- 
 ways." Many a mind which has met great 
 issues and crises bravely and serenely is 
 broken down by a succession of ignoble cares. 
 The anxious foreboding within the closed 
 circle of the same thorny problem speedily 
 robs us of the mood of victory. 
 
 Jesus gave himself unreservedly to meeting 
 this aspect of men's lives. To replace a vitiat- 
 ing worry by a confident trust he ever reck- 
 oned among first things. In his revelation of 
 the good purposes of the Father, and the 
 Father's knowledge and love of his children, 
 he gave men a tangent which led them out to 
 freedom and peace. When one is lost in the 
 woods and is traveling in a circle the best 
 thing to do is to climb a tree and get one's 
 bearings and so bring to a confused mind the 
 steadying power of a long perspective. That 
 is just what filial trust does as we catch its 
 contagion from Jesus. It does not dislodge 
 all difficulties or solve all perplexities. These 
 remain. But trust gives a new might with 
 
THINKING IN A CIRCLE 35 
 
 which to deal with them, a readiness to do our 
 best and leave the issue with him. To know 
 that God's 
 
 greatness flows around our incompleteness. 
 Round our restlessness, his rest, 
 
 is to emerge from circles into the saving health 
 of straight lines. 
 
 Temptation waxes strong in circles. It is 
 the repeated insistence of an image returning 
 to the mind which finally carries away resist- 
 ance like the undermining of a dyke by a 
 spring freshet. The mind returns to the allur- 
 ing temptation as the bird circles around the 
 serpent. As we look at the life of the Master 
 we see how again and again the same tempta- 
 tions that assailed him in the wilderness recur. 
 Yet he did not lose his way. He always found 
 the will of his Father the straight line which 
 led him unerringly to the mark of his high 
 calling. With every temptation there is a way 
 of escape. Joseph found it. "How can I do 
 this great wickedness and sin against God?" 
 Peter found it. "We must obey God rather 
 than man." 
 
 Edward Rowland Sill gives us a clue toward 
 changing little circles into noble highways ; 
 
36 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 Forenoon and afternoon and night, forenoon 
 And afternoon and night, forenoon and — what? 
 The empty song repeats itself — no more? 
 Yes, this is life. Make this forenoon sublime, 
 This afternoon a psalm, this night a prayer. 
 And time is conquered and thy crown is won. 
 
VII 
 
 THE GIANT THRILLER 
 
 "Mother," said a little boy, as he stepped 
 off the roller coaster at Coney Island, between 
 gasps as his jumping heart settled back from 
 his throat to its normal place, "I'd like to live 
 on a Giant Thriller." He looked back long- 
 ingly at the great serpentine curves over 
 which he had just traveled with such tingling 
 sensations to heart and head. 
 
 No doubt we have all at times shared his 
 wish. And a great many children of a larger 
 growth continue to cherish the desire in one 
 form or another, long after they have ceased 
 to give it such frank expression. 
 
 Life to a large number of people is just that 
 — a Giant Thriller. It holds just so much 
 "permanent possibility of sensation." Its 
 final end is not so much the destination it 
 reaches as the number and degree of thrills, 
 excitement, and pleasure which the ups and 
 downs of the journey may be made to yield. 
 It is a sort of colossal amusement resort in 
 
 37 
 
38 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 which the modern Shylock whets the edge of 
 his appetite and demands, not his pound of 
 flesh, but his hour of stimulated thrill. Some 
 one said of Whistler that he always lived up 
 to his emotional income. To be really able 
 to do that in a crude way, to fill one's days 
 with the greatest number and variety of elec- 
 tric shocks and have its dull and quiet hours 
 figure as the occasional period amid a long 
 and bright succession of exclamation points — 
 this is the chief end of man according to the 
 (very much) Shorter Catechism of the multi- 
 tude. 
 
 This modern quest of a thrill, unlike the 
 spirit of intelligent adventure in "the spacious 
 days of the great Elizabeth," is not a noble 
 one. Its cheap and tawdry scene is for a large 
 part the saloon, the theater, the dance hall, 
 the erotic novel, the moving pictures. He 
 would be blind who failed to see the real social 
 service and possibilities of moving pictures. 
 He would be blind too who failed to see in 
 many of them the unwholesome refuge of 
 vacant and rapidly disintegrating minds. Its 
 cheap terrors, crude substitutes for humor and 
 vulgarization of love are forces yet to be reck- 
 oned with. Life as a roller coaster of pleasur- 
 
THE GIANT THRILLER 39 
 
 able thrills, refine the character of the thrills 
 as one may, is still a poor thing. It makes thin 
 souls, flabby, irresponsible, and stupid. 
 
 The Merry -Go-Round is another of the peo- 
 ple's playthings which represent a real and 
 common attitude to life. It is not charac- 
 terized by the ardent chase of pleasure. It is 
 the unthinking and limp acceptance of a little 
 track of routine and convention which sends 
 one day around the same circle as another. 
 Each day has the same thoughts, as the barrel 
 organ has the same tunes. This circle is by 
 no means a depraved one. A great many thor- 
 oughly upright and likable people act on the 
 assumption of life being a more or less aimless 
 spinning around the same groove in which 
 their part is to get as comfortably fixed and 
 pass the time as pleasantly as possible. But 
 this assumption carries a great liability — dis- 
 appointment. This complaint was voiced not 
 long ago very exactly : "I've spent all my life 
 making money to get food to eat and clothes 
 to wear. The food doesn't agree with me and 
 the clothes don't fit. I guess I must be a 
 failure." He certainly was! One may come 
 to the end of the most placid and unruffled 
 existence conceivable, but if his life has never 
 
40 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 been stirred by noble aspirations, he may cast 
 his final ballot with Macbeth : 
 
 It is a tale 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. 
 Signifying nothing. 
 
 It seems strange that any one in his right 
 senses should wish to ride on the ^^hump the 
 humps/' It is a long slide broken here and 
 there by round protrusions, against which one 
 is violently thrown* if he does not steer clear 
 of them. No doubt it is the balked disposition 
 of fear which finds gratification and makes 
 the ride popular. 
 
 Is it too much of an extravagance to say 
 that the aim of life to some is to avoid as 
 many of its risks of misfortune and trouble as 
 possible? This world, it seems, is a vale of 
 tears; trouble comes to all. Hence the art 
 of life consists in skillfully missing as many 
 of its bumps as you may. This conceives of 
 happiness in the wholly negative terms of 
 escape. And, of course, it misses it com- 
 pletely, for happiness is never negative; it is 
 always positive. It is never the mere avoid- 
 ance of evil ; it is always the presence of active 
 good. What shall it profit a man if he escapes 
 
THE GIANT THRILLER 41 
 
 every conceivable misfortune, if at the same 
 time he misses everything else. Peabody says 
 finely of Jesus, "Joy and sorrow were never 
 ends to be gained or avoided ; they become the 
 mere rhythm of his step as he moves steadily 
 toward his supreme desire." It is as vain to 
 compute the success of life in terms of the 
 disagreeable things escaped as to reckon it by 
 the empty hours of sleep. 
 
 A truer symbol of life which the playground 
 afforded was an old cloth-covered prairie 
 schooner preserved as an adjunct to a Wild 
 West show. Here was the relic of a great 
 adventure in faith, hope, and love, and as such 
 a symbol of life defined in its highest terms. 
 The pioneer who went out, like Abraham, "not 
 knowing whither he went," yet daring to be- 
 lieve in the future, a gentleman unafraid of 
 the bright face of danger, impelled by the love 
 of family and kin to give them a little better 
 stake in life than he began with — this man 
 lived. And as he journeyed, taking both joy 
 and sorrow as incidental risks of the road, he 
 cleared the way for another, so that he did 
 
 not 
 
 alone 
 Conquer and come to his goal, 
 Leaving the rest in the wild. 
 
42 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 This is the life to which our Master calls us, 
 a sharing in the adventure of love which 
 chooses the spiritual in place of the merely 
 sensual and economic. It is a pathway of joy 
 incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not 
 away. 
 
VIII 
 ON THE LINE OF DISCOVERY 
 
 Among all the tributes that have been paid 
 to Gladstone, one that comes nearest to the 
 secret of the abounding vigor and freshness 
 of his ninety-year span of life was the remark 
 of John Morley : "He kept himself on the line 
 of discovery." At an age when most men 
 twenty years his junior were completely occu- 
 pied with the reminiscences of distant years, 
 *his heart and mind were busy with the prob- 
 lems of to-morrow. It is a phrase which in- 
 terprets the interest and achievement of any 
 life. 
 
 The zest of life lies in its ventures. Kipling 
 has put into classic form in his "Pioneer" a 
 man who lived on the line of discovery : 
 
 "There's no use in going farther, it's the edge of culti- 
 vation." 
 So they said and I believed it; broke my ground and 
 sowed my crop; 
 Built my barns and strung my fences in a little border 
 station 
 Hid away beneath the foothills where the trails run 
 out and stop. 
 
 43 
 
44 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 But a voice as clear as conscience rang interminable 
 changes 
 On one everlasting whisper, day and night-repeated 
 
 "Something out there, something hidden — Go and look 
 behind the ranges! 
 Something lost behind the ranges — ^Lost and waiting 
 for you — Go!" 
 
 So he leaves the comforts of a settled farm, for 
 hardship and privation, drawn by the insistent 
 lure of discovery. 
 
 We all begin life on the line of discovery. 
 The world is new every morning and every 
 day a fresh delight. The magical storage 
 battery of curiosity supplies endless energy 
 to every faculty. The greatest loss in the years 
 that follow is not so much that they bring the 
 philosophic mind, as that with their more 
 settled aspect we allow the familiar outline 
 of our little world to become a twice-told tale 
 and stop discovering. One of the characters 
 in a story by O. Henry says of the town in 
 which he lives, "The trouble with this place 
 is that everybody in it dies when they get 
 about twenty-one, and they don't do anything 
 but snore and toss around in their sleep the 
 rest of their lives.'' It is a case of the tree 
 about which one can say, "It grows," becoming 
 
ON THE LINE OF DISCOVERY 45 
 
 the flag pole about which all that can be said 
 is "It grew." 
 
 With unerring instinct Jesus waged con- 
 tinual war on self-satisfaction as the great 
 arch enemy of growth. His parable of the full 
 storehouse, in which the man who says to his 
 soul that he has goods laid up for many years 
 finds that in that very hour his life is gone, 
 is one that finds daily application. It is true 
 of the teacher. When he stops learning and 
 trusts to doling out the same parcels of his 
 fixed stock of knowledge, that very day his 
 spontaneity, freshness, and contagion, his very 
 life as a teacher, is gone, and another routine 
 machine is added to the world's already over- 
 stocked supply. It is the sad tragedy in the 
 life of the preacher or other professional man 
 which we call "the dead line." 
 
 Christianity was first called "the Way" be- 
 fore any formal name was given to the reli- 
 gion of Jesus. It states Christian discipleship 
 in the right manner — ^in terms of motion. 
 Rightly apprehended, being a Christian is not 
 so much a process of anchoring one's soul in 
 the haven of rest as it is of sailing the seas 
 with God. It keeps men on the line of dis- 
 covery. 
 
46 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 Prayer is a sure line for the discovery of 
 God and the exploration of the hidden self. 
 Jesiis's idea of prayer lifts it out of the realm 
 of a bargain-counter transaction with the 
 world^s Storekeeper into that of communion 
 with the Father. Prayer is to religion what 
 experiment is to science. It is the personal 
 verification of hypotheses and probabilities. 
 Acting on the faith that God is, it finds him. 
 The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous 
 man is like the little Santa Maria setting out 
 from the port of Spain on a great voyage of 
 discovery. And as the evidence that it has 
 really discovered the Father it brings back 
 the wonderful treasure of a changed life — new 
 powers brought to light in the hidden conti- 
 nent of the soul. 
 
 By service we keep ourselves on fresh path- 
 ways. "Men grow quickly on battlefields," 
 said a wise French campaigner. We find our- 
 selves through responsibility and effort. Gen- 
 eral Grant, a failure in the tannery at Galena, 
 only came to himself under the spur of Shiloh 
 and Vicksburg. 
 
 By the cultivation of active sympathies life 
 is kept out of blind alleys. It is a faithful 
 saying and worthy of all acceptation that a 
 
ON THE LINE OF DISCOVERY 47 
 
 loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge. 
 Sympathy is the rarest form of travel. What 
 travel does for an alert mind, quickening the 
 sense of life, replacing a threadbare set of 
 thoughts with new interests, putting ourselves 
 in the place of another with sympathetic con- 
 cern does for the soul. When the prophet 
 Ezekiel, depressed and melancholy in an alien 
 land, entered into the lives of his fellow exiles, 
 and "sat down where they sat," the somber 
 hues of dejection and despair which had 
 colored all his thinking gave way to the posi- 
 tive shades of love and faith. We speak com- 
 placently of "mellow old age," as though it 
 were mellow of necessity. It is just as apt 
 to be sour. It will be sour and the heart 
 shriveled, unless it finds new leaseholds on 
 freshness and unselfishness by a real stake in 
 the lives of others. 
 
 After all, there is only one sure line of dis- 
 covery. It is itself one of the great spiritual 
 discoveries of Jesus — "He that loseth his life 
 shall find it." 
 
IX 
 GETTING INTO SOCIETY 
 
 Getting into Society is a popular game. 
 
 During wars and rumors of wars we are 
 continually regaled with vivid accounts of the 
 invasion of New York by some possible enemy. 
 But these highly imaginative invasions are 
 never so interesting as the real invasion of 
 the city which goes on every year. There is 
 the invasion from Europe, running into the 
 hundred thousands; the invasion from the 
 country of young men and women, coming up 
 to seek their fortune in the whirlpool. And 
 much less noble, but not less real, the yearly 
 invasion of people who have made their for- 
 tune in other places and who seek the city to 
 "break into Society." 
 
 It is played with the most feverish spirit 
 by tliose who lack most conspicuously any 
 inner standards of worth, and who must keep 
 alive their sense of personal significance by 
 all sorts of outward recognition. This abode 
 of the Blessed, the Elysian fields of Society 
 
 48 
 
GETTING INTO SOCIETY 49 
 
 with a big S, has been well compared to the 
 ladderlike arrangement of the Hindu caste 
 system, where one must kiss the feet of the one 
 above and kick the face of the one beneath. 
 So the gentle art of snobbery goes on to new 
 refinements among those whose only measure 
 of personal position is the wholly negative one 
 of exclusiveness. 
 
 It is a game for small stakes, which Thack- 
 eray has pictured in immortal fashion in 
 Vanity Fair. "What I want to make," he 
 wrote to his mother, speaking of the novel, "is 
 a set of people living without God in the 
 world, only that is a cant phrase." How well 
 he succeeded. Lord Steyne, Sir Pitt Crawley, 
 poor stupid Joe Sedley, and Becky, above all, 
 answer in their own way. 
 
 To dress, to call, to dine, to break 
 
 No canon of the social code. 
 The little laws that lackeys make. 
 
 The futile decalogue of mode — 
 How many a soul for these things lives 
 
 With pious passion, grave intent! 
 And never even in dreams has seen 
 
 The things that are more excellent! 
 
 Yet the very object of this trivial game, when 
 conceived in a true manner, may be made one 
 
50 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 of the largest and most worthy aims in life. 
 To get one into society that is really worth 
 getting into is the end both of education and 
 religion. Education is a process of social ad- 
 justment. Its aim is to develop the individual 
 and bring him into the most helpful social 
 relationship with his fellows. It is a large 
 function of religion to lead men into inspiring 
 fellowship with great souls, and to initiate 
 them into the great society of the helpers of 
 the race. 
 
 Books are a sure and lasting means of get- 
 ting into good society. A well-selected library 
 is a gathering of the great, admittance into 
 whose intimacy brings more real honor than 
 all the court levees ever held. "The Four 
 Hundred" most worth cultivating are not 
 dressed in silk and spangled with diamonds; 
 they are bound in leather and studded with 
 gleaming thoughts. Some one has said of a 
 group of young radicals in England that they 
 climbed back stairs to dark attics and shut 
 themselves in with the gods. One who in his 
 library has never been "stung with the splen- 
 dor of a sudden thought" has much to learn 
 about good society. The real beginning of the 
 true life of Keats was when as a boy the 
 
GETTING INTO SOCIETY 51 
 
 entrance into the society of Homer's gallery 
 of heroes was as though "a new planet swung 
 into his ken/' Here is where the Bible serves 
 the race in such transcendent manner. The 
 surest anchorage of our lives in times of be- 
 wilderment and the strongest lodestar in times 
 of action is in its great souls. The man who 
 knows Paul, whose heart is no stranger to 
 the enthusiasm of Isaiah or to the devotion 
 of John, who, above all, knows the moods and 
 spirit of Jesus, is in good society. 
 
 The communion of saints — the fellowship of 
 the redeemed — ^is the greatest society on earth. 
 That grand old schoolmaster of Rugby, Dr. 
 Arnold, once said, "Whenever I can receive 
 into my care a boy fresh from his father, with- 
 out emotion, it is high time for me to be off." 
 No familiarity ever robbed him of the sense 
 of the glory of his vocation. Whenever we 
 can look at the familiar sight of a person join- 
 ing the church, without feeling emotion, it is 
 high time for us to be off too. 
 
 It is our reddest red-letter day when we get 
 into that society whose names are written on 
 His hands. When Jerry McAuley was so 
 gloriously converted down in Water Street 
 there was no mention of the fact in the society 
 
52 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 columns in the New York newspapers. It was 
 the greatest social event of the year, neverthe- 
 less. He had joined the immortals who here 
 on earth were living in the power of an end- 
 less life. At one time when Mark Twain had 
 received an invitation to dine with the em- 
 peror of Germany, his little daughter said, 
 innocently, to him, "You'll soon know every- 
 body except God, won't you, papa?" There 
 was real pathos in the question. What mat- 
 ters a dozen kings or so on our calling list, if 
 it is to be a case of "everybody except God" ? 
 
 Have you ever joined the International 
 Order of the Helpers of Men? It has never 
 been unanimously popular. It was founded 
 by One who is still regarded as a trifle eccen- 
 tric in many quarters. Its charter reads : "Let 
 him that is great among you be your minister." 
 The Roman satirist, Lucian, long ago pointed 
 out the fact that its basic idea was absurd — 
 that of being brothers. But it includes those 
 of whom the world is not worthy. O, if with 
 the thousand and one lodges and societies we 
 belong to, we would only join the human race 
 — feel the pulse of its brotherhood, its twinge 
 of pain as our own and lay its burden on our 
 shoulders! When we get into that company 
 
GETTING INTO SOCIETY 53 
 
 we do not merely ornament a drawing room 
 for an hour, but shine as the stars, forever and 
 ever. 
 
 "There is one great society on earth, the 
 noble living and the noble dead." 
 
THE SUNNY SIDE OF TEN 
 
 "Of such is the kingdom of heaven." 
 
 Most of us remember some lines back in our 
 old copybooks, which ran like this : 
 
 Give to the world the best that you have. 
 And the best will come back to you. 
 
 In no place is the old truth so true as in the 
 entrance requirement of the kingdom of God, 
 "Except ye become as little children, ye shall 
 not enter the kingdom of God." The Master 
 demands the very best we have — the childlike 
 qualities of teachableness and faith. It is an 
 inexorable condition that we bring these. But 
 the return which he makes, good measure, 
 pressed down and running over, is that he 
 enables us to keep unwithered by age and un- 
 spoiled by custom those very qualities of child- 
 hood. To be a member of the Kingdom is to 
 keep oneself forever on the sunny side of ten. 
 
 James Russell Lowell, when passing once, in 
 the outskirts of Boston, a building which bore 
 
 54 
 
THE SUNNY SIDE OF TEN 55 
 
 the inscription, "Home for Incurable Chil- 
 dren," said, playfully, to a friend, "They'll get 
 me in there some day." That is just what he 
 was — an incurable child, carrying over into 
 his last years an irrepressible youthfulness of 
 heart. That is what a real member of the 
 Kingdom is — an incurable child. 
 
 On the sunny side of ten there is an atmos- 
 phere of trust. Have you ever thought of how 
 much of the glory of childhood comes from the 
 unruffled calm of its trust? It is only gradu- 
 ally that we come to realize that the years 
 that set as lightly on our shoulders as a June 
 TTreeze were years of intense strain and re- 
 sponsibility to our fathers and mothers. The 
 child's world is a garden of delight because 
 its boundless trust makes everything in it 
 bloom as a spring day touches a valley and 
 calls forth its beauty. Unsophisticated cre- 
 dulity is a childish thing, to be put away when 
 one becomes a man. But a childlike trust is 
 part of our permanent inheritance as joint 
 heirs of Jesus Christ. "He careth for you." 
 "He knoweth our frame." "He knoweth the 
 way that I take." "He knoweth you have need 
 of these things." A doctor told a student who 
 complained of headaches and whose window 
 
56 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 looked off into empty space that he needed 
 something in his view to "lean his eyes up 
 against." It is a good thing to lean our eyes 
 up against the background of the God and 
 Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 The child lives in the present. To a child 
 on a picnic there has been no yesterday ; there 
 will be no to-morrow. "One crowded hour of 
 glorious life'' is his. He is unvexed by past 
 regrets or future fears, while we, his elders, 
 live so largely in the day before yesterday or 
 the middle of next week. Dr. William Osier 
 tells us the problem of happiness is a very 
 simple one. It consists merely in pressing 
 two buttons, one of which shuts off the past 
 and the other shuts off the future. Two 
 buttons, that is all. So beautifully simple! 
 It is too bad that he neglects to tell us just 
 how to do it! He who has the keys of life 
 and death is the only one who can push the 
 buttons. "As a thick cloud have I blotted out 
 thy transgressions" ; that is the only assurance 
 which can shut out the peace-destroying past. 
 "I will not leave thee nor forsake thee"; that 
 is what lifts the cloud of future fears. The 
 Christian who is persuaded that He is able to 
 keep that which he has committed unto Him, 
 
THE SUNNY SIDE OF TEN 57 
 
 may live as fully in the present as the most 
 care-free child. The Jewish religion in the 
 time of Christ knew only two days — yester- 
 day and to-morrow. It is highly significant 
 that the first recorded word of Jesus's public 
 ministry was the word "to-day.^' "To-day" is 
 the day of salvation, of opportunity, of joy. 
 
 On the sunny side of ten we live in an ideal 
 world. 
 
 When I was a beggarly boy 
 
 And lived in a cellar damp, 
 I had not a friend nor a toy, 
 
 But I had Aladdin's lamp. 
 When I could not sleep for the cold, 
 
 I had fire enough in my brain. 
 And builded with roofs of gold 
 
 My beautiful castles in Spain. 
 
 The world is full, then, of ideal personages 
 and ideal forces. Prince Charming may ap- 
 pear from around the corner at any time. The 
 pot of gold is at the end of the rainbow if we 
 only hurry fast enough. The youthful Cole- 
 ridge walking down the street, swinging his 
 arms wildly, accidentally hits an old gentle- 
 man on the head and pauses politely to ex- 
 plain that he is cutting off the heads of Turk- 
 ish infidels with his scimitar. From this realm 
 of the ideal we emerge into what is called the 
 
58 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 real world, and a glory has departed. But 
 the man of Christian faith, to whom God and 
 the increasing purpose which runs through the 
 ages are realities, lives in an ideal world. 
 Creation to him is not a dreary mechanism of 
 interlocked wheels, for the earnest expectation 
 of the creature waiteth for the manifestation 
 of the sons of God. His Kingdom is an ever- 
 lasting Kingdom, and its members have the 
 dew of their youth. 
 
 Ponce de Leon set out in the wrong direc- 
 tion to discover the fountain of youth. It is 
 not in the everglades of Florida. It is the 
 eternal spring, a "well by the gate" in Beth- 
 lehem of Judaea. 
 
XI 
 A BINET TEST FOR DEFECTIVES 
 
 Society is at last beginning to pay some 
 attention to its ill-favored stepchildren. Re- 
 versing the policy of centuries of giving nearly 
 all its thought and care to its promising off- 
 spring, it is acting on the discovery that 
 schools should be not alone for the exceptional 
 boy or girl, or even for the normal child. Its 
 latest venture is in schools for the backward, 
 the defective and subnormal. By looking at 
 their needs, not with the eyes of unthinking 
 tradition, but with intelligence lighted by 
 love, it is doing wonderful things in preparing 
 for life the crippled in body and mind. 
 
 The first step in such a work is to find out 
 the degree of mental normality of a child. One 
 of the most approved and scientific methods 
 is what is known as the "Binet Test for Defec- 
 tives," so called from its inventor. It consists 
 of a number of simple questions and opera- 
 tions which readily disclose the degree of 
 deficiency of eyesight or hearing, keenness of 
 
 59 
 
60 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 observation, muscular response, and power of 
 mental coordination. On the basis of this test 
 the means and methods of education are deter- 
 mined. 
 
 If a test similar to that used for mental 
 capacity in the schools could be devised to 
 determine the degree of spiritual efficiency of 
 the members of the church, it would be the 
 means of large usefulness. Spiritual capacity 
 and usefulness, of course, can never be meas- 
 ured by any kind of a machine, however 
 cleverly constructed, nor judged by any list of 
 superficial questions. We have seen too many 
 disastrous snap judgments formed on the basis 
 of the church's meeting or failing to meet some 
 arbitrary and mechanical test which seems so 
 important to the one who makes it that all 
 else is left out of consideration. We have 
 grown exceedingly weary of the dismal 
 prophet who tells us that the prayer meeting 
 is the "barometer of the church," and bewails 
 the approach of dark and stormy days when- 
 ever the attendance (or the noise, perhaps) 
 fails to register one hundred per cent. 
 
 Yet as those who are urged to show them- 
 selves approved workmen, the consideration 
 of what would be some elements of a real test 
 
A TEST FOR DEFECTIVES 61 
 
 of fundamental deficiency in the Master's 
 service ought to be a vital one. It is not 
 primarily a test of character which is pro- 
 posed, or of sincerity or intent. We will 
 make a large assumption and take those for 
 granted. It would, rather, be along the lines 
 of the Binet Test — one of Christian sense- 
 development and nerve response. One vital test 
 of deficiency in service for every member and 
 every church would certainly be the question : 
 How far can you seef It is easy enough to 
 see the things that lie right in front of us in 
 our routine work ; it is not so easy to see over 
 the hill of the years and catch a vision of the 
 value of unspectacular long-range work. But 
 it is far more important. It is easy to see the 
 value of getting Mr. Brown, the cashier of the 
 First National Bank, into the church, but it 
 is quite another thing to see the value of hold- 
 ing and training the little freckle-faced, 
 red-headed Jones boy, who does nothing in 
 Sunday school but throw paper wads, to every- 
 body's annoyance. The chances are that the 
 latter is much more strategic. The financial 
 results of a church supper are far more satisfy- 
 ing than the deficit incurred by a girls' club, 
 viewed from a one- or two-year standpoint, 
 
62 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 which is the one usually employed. Carlyle 
 said of Maeaulay that he had spectacles in- 
 stead of eyes. Spectacles, seeing only the 
 outward and obvious, will never serve for eyes 
 in the work of the Kingdom. The long-range 
 vision which plans for twenty years hence is 
 necessary. "No one ought to be satisfied," 
 says Dr. Cabot, "to test his work by any easier 
 standards than these: First, am I seeing all 
 the actual facts, the ever new and unique facts 
 as they come before me? Second, am I trac- 
 ing out, as far as I can, the full bearing, the 
 true lesson of this movement or situation?" 
 It would be an immeasurable boon to the 
 statesmanship of the church if these tests were 
 to become part of its inner consciousness. The 
 church without a definite sacrificial policy for 
 its boys and girls has been well compared to 
 a dog which is being shipped by express and 
 has chewed up its tag. It is going somewhere, 
 but no one knows just where. 
 
 An agent of Tammany Hall in June, 1915, 
 refused to take a lease on a piece of property 
 desired for a new building for the organization 
 because he could secure it for only two terms 
 of ninety-nine years each ! It recalls some old 
 words about the children of this world being 
 
A TEST FOR DEFECTIVES 63 
 
 wiser in their generation than the children of 
 light. How much more essential is long-range 
 vision to the Christian statesman! 
 
 Give me not scenes more charming; give me eyes 
 To see the beauty that around me lies; 
 To see the charm of souls, see angels shy 
 Among the faces of the passers-by. 
 
 How quick is your motor response? The 
 lapse of time between the mental impression 
 and its expression in muscular reaction is 
 made of crucial importance in gauging the 
 fineness of mental organization. It has the 
 same cardinal place in measuring spiritual 
 efficiency. It was a principle of Queen Eliza- 
 beth's — to which we owe the result that 
 American civilization is Anglo-Saxon instead 
 of Latin — that discovery without possession 
 was without avail. The knowledge of spiritual 
 truth without real possession by life response 
 is equally futile. The response of the defective 
 is like the theological student to whom the 
 call for missionary service came and who an- 
 swered, "Lord, here am I ; send John." 
 
 A lady was being congratulated on her son's 
 making the football team at college, and was 
 asked what position he played. "I don't 
 know," she answered, "but I think he is one 
 
64 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 of the drawbacks/' It may have been true. 
 Many a player, with all the assistance of a 
 fully equipped uniform, is not really a half- 
 back but only a drawback. And when our 
 response to the truth is slow and indistinct, 
 that is our real position. The church does not 
 need guards so much as it needs tackles in 
 its ground-gaining offense. "Acts may be for- 
 given," says Stevenson, "but God himself can- 
 not forgive the hanger-back." 
 
XII 
 WHAT'S THE NEWS? 
 
 "Will there be any newspapers in heaven, 
 papa?" asked seven-years. 
 
 Father was an editor and his reply was 
 brief : "I hope not." 
 
 No doubt the people who have been inter- 
 viewed for the press very often will be unani- 
 mous in the opinion that there could not be a 
 newspaper in heaven because there will be no 
 reporters there. It raises a suggestive ques- 
 tion as to just what would be deemed worthy 
 of chronicle in a daily record of the events of 
 earth seen in the light of heaven's standards, 
 where not the outward appearance but the 
 final value was seen. It is not so extravagant 
 a fancy either. For, surely, in that Eye which 
 neithers slumbers nor sleeps and which notes 
 even the sparrow's fall, all things are unerr- 
 ingly noted as either trivial or great. 
 
 Such a record would be so different from the 
 morning paper which is served up with our 
 breakfast that it would be hard to recognize 
 
 65 
 
66 FAEES, PLEASE! 
 
 our world through its pages. On that much 
 we could all agree. We place hourly depend- 
 ence on the paper to keep us in touch with the 
 world, and life in the modern world would be 
 almost inconceivable without it. Yet we 
 realize that in them we see through a glass 
 darkly. The truth is only approximated. A 
 parade of mourners for those lost in a factory 
 fire was held in New York in April, 1911. The 
 headlines in the different papers the next day 
 ran thus: 60,000 parade— Globe ; 122,000 
 parade in rain — World; Estimate of 200,000 
 exceeded — Evening Sun; 300,000 in parade 
 —Telegram; 50,000 walked— Sun; 80,000 
 marched — Tribune ; 100,000 pass in pageant — 
 Mail. "What is truth?'' might well be a fair 
 question ! 
 
 Even in the most conservative papers, the 
 seamy, feverish, and sensational aspects of life 
 bulk out of their real proportion. A Euro- 
 pean reading American journals might be for- 
 given for concluding that we are degenerating, 
 since the crimes, scandals, and divorces are 
 served up with such embellishment. One 
 needs to read papers like the Survey and the 
 reviews to keep his balance and learn the 
 world's real constructive work. Stevenson's 
 
WHAT^S THE NEWS? 67 
 
 complaint is well justified: "So long as an 
 artist is on his head, is painting with a flute, 
 or writes with an etching needle, or conducts 
 an orchestra with a meatax, all is well, and 
 plaudits shower along with the roses. But 
 any plain man who tries to follow the unobtru- 
 sive canons of his art is but a commonplace 
 figure." 
 
 The thought of what the relative importance 
 of the day's happenings would be in heaven's 
 eyes, leads us to two truths about news that 
 should never be allowed to grow dim. 
 
 1. The real news of any time is the working 
 of forces that are making to-morrow. Had 
 you asked a citizen of Rome in Nero's time, 
 "What's the news?" he would have told you 
 that the triumph in the Forum that day was 
 the biggest thing in the world. Whereas, we 
 know from the vantage point of to-day that 
 the real news was that a little Christian prayer 
 meeting was held down in the catacombs. 
 That was the force that was making a new 
 civilization. Beside it all the triumphs the 
 Forum ever saw were about as important as 
 the buzzing of a fly. An Englishman in the 
 early part of the eighteenth century on being 
 asked the same question would have told you 
 
68 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 something about Parliament. He did not 
 dream that the greatest event of a half century 
 was the fact that up there in the Epworth 
 rectory the tired and overworked mother of a 
 large family was teaching her children to pray. 
 Yet it is only a matter of sober history that in 
 the quiet and obscure rectory was being 
 shaped the force that was not only to revitalize 
 England but also to bless the whole world. It 
 is in the light of such truth that we must open 
 our eyes on to-day and realize that wherever 
 any personal force for the blessing of the days 
 to come* is being shaped, there is the real news 
 as God sees it. 
 
 2. Hence the street corner test is never the 
 true test The blatant noise which it makes 
 on the street is no test of the importance of 
 anything. A newspaper in heaven would have 
 a page of trade reports, but it would not be 
 filled with stock quotations and bank clear- 
 ings. The giving of the Widow's Mite would 
 be worthy of an extra edition, for it was the 
 largest financial transaction that ever took 
 place on the planet in i.ts influence. Here is 
 a man who in the face of great temptation is 
 holding on to- his honor and keeping faith with 
 his noblest self. That is the biggest thing in 
 
.WHAT'S THE NEWS? 69 
 
 the trade reports, as God views them. Here 
 is an invalid blessing her little circle with 
 unfailing patience and cheer. That is real 
 news. Here is a woman going down to the 
 slums of the city, putting herself into the lives 
 of the unprivileged. Nothing in the city out- 
 ranks the record of her day. 
 
 The man who truly sees is never overawed 
 by mere noise. The greatest actions are done 
 in small struggles. There are noble and mys- 
 terious triumphs which no eye sees save God's, 
 no renown rewards, and no flare of trumpets 
 salutes. But they are entered in his Book of 
 Eemembrance. 
 
XIII 
 THREE CHAIRS 
 
 In his description of the cabin in which he 
 spent those memorable days on Walden Pond, 
 Thoreau says that his sitting room contained 
 three chairs — one for solitude, two for friend- 
 ship, and three for crowds. There can be no 
 doubt that the favorite one with Thoreau was 
 the single chair that represented solitude, but 
 he was wise enough to realize that even for 
 one like himself, who could make such splen- 
 did use of solitude, the isolated life is incom- 
 plete. 
 
 Thoreau's three chairs well represented to 
 him the furnishing of the ideal living room. 
 This complete furnishing is by no means so 
 common as we might imagine. Everyone 
 moves in a superficial way, at least, in the 
 three concentric circles of himself, his friends, 
 and the world. But the concentration in one 
 to the virtual exclusion of the others is far 
 from rare. Perhaps the person represented by 
 the three chairs is the most common — the man 
 
 70 
 
THREE CHAIRS 71 
 
 who lives in the crowd with its changing 
 scenes and outward interests, but who, if he 
 is thrown on his own resources for a week, is 
 unable to rub one thought against another for 
 his own entertainment, and suffers terrible 
 pangs of ennui. At the other extreme there 
 are the souls which, whether very much like 
 stars or not, dwell apart, and neither ask much 
 from society nor give much to it. 
 
 One chair. It is a poorly furnished house 
 that does not have its chair for solitude. "We 
 are too busy, too encumbered, too much occu- 
 pied." It is Amiel who is speaking. "In in- 
 action which is meditative and attentive the 
 wrinkles of the soul are smoothed away. 
 Reverie, like the rain of night, restores color 
 and force to the thoughts which have been 
 blanched and wearied by the heat of the day." 
 A celebrated philosopher while out making 
 visits one afternoon turned in at his own door 
 to pay a call without realizing that he lived 
 there himself. There is no better place at 
 which to pay a call, for we come to a sorry 
 pass indeed when w^e have a long list of ac- 
 quaintances, but know as little of our inner 
 selves as of Afghanistan. To pay a visit to 
 ourselves and learn what manner of men we 
 
72 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 are is an indispensable condition of growth, 
 mental as well as spiritual. It is a very differ- 
 ent thing from a weakening indulgence in 
 sentimental introspection, with the sad results 
 of which we are all too familiar. Walt Whit- 
 man voiced a sturdy and very healthy protest 
 against this kind of morbid self-questioning: 
 "It is as though we should sit down to a meal 
 and ask, Why do I eat? Why does this taste 
 good?' or on a summer day, Why do I feel so 
 good in the glory of the sun?' Why? Why? 
 Why? Everlastingly picking life to pieces in- 
 stead of living." Avoiding this extreme, how- 
 ever, there is still the other, that of keeping 
 our minds so hospitable to outward things that 
 we have never courage to fathom the rush of 
 outside interests and find out the real rock 
 bottom of our own beings. To let our interest 
 wander in every direction comes to the same 
 thing as having no interest in anything. The 
 only way in which we profit by our experiences 
 is in selecting those we choose to possess and in 
 the chair of solitude to study, weigh, and make 
 them our own. Rabbi Hillel used to dismiss 
 his classes saying, "You may go now; I have 
 a guest to entertain.'' The "guest" was his 
 own soul. 
 
THREE CHAIRS 73 
 
 Character needs solitude. We can never 
 estimate the part played in the life of Lincoln 
 by the fact that his early years were set amid 
 the great brooding places of the earth, the 
 silences of the hills and forest. With space 
 for contemplation and reverie, he thought 
 things through. John R. Mott has finely put 
 the whole plea for meditation and prayer — 
 ^^The streams that turn the machinery of the 
 world, take their rise in solitary places." 
 
 Two chairs for Friendship. Is it true that 
 close and intimate friendships are going out 
 of fashion, just like family carriages, hoop- 
 skirts, and other quaint customs of departed 
 days? If it is, we are paying a heavy price 
 for the inventions which have supplanted 
 them. There is no doubt that the better means 
 of communication, the endless multiplication of 
 books, and the higher gearing of speed in the 
 present days, have made us less willing to give 
 up the time the formation and growth of an 
 intimate friendship requires. There are other 
 costs in frankness and humility. But the 
 aspect of life represented by two chairs is one 
 of the richest and as we look over the story 
 of the most fruitful lives we find again and 
 again the central turning point to have been 
 
74 FAKES, PLEASE! 
 
 the formation of some fine friendship of last- 
 ing inspiration. 
 
 Three Chairs for Crowds, Not large crowds 
 for most of us. Only a few ever live to count 
 their influence in multitudes. But for all of 
 us there is the danger of a premature satisfac- 
 tion in a few choice fellowships and withdraw- 
 ing ourselves from the larger circle of those 
 in whose lives we could fill some real want, 
 but who are less personally attractive. That 
 ever-present remembrance in the mind of 
 Jesus deserves a place with all : "Other sheep 
 have I which are not of this fold." One of the 
 most instructive things in his life was the 
 intense degree with which he loved the close 
 fellowship of congenial friends, the rare home 
 at Bethany, and the reenforcement of that 
 inner circle of Peter, James, and John. Yet 
 he withdrew so rarely with these. They never 
 obscured his eyes to that farther vision of the 
 fields white unto harvest, the harassed multi- 
 tudes of sheep without a shepherd. 
 
XIV 
 HOW MUCH ARE YOU WORTH? 
 
 When Li Hung Chang was visiting America 
 a number of years ago he had a very discon- 
 certing way of asking people he met, with 
 Oriental blandness, "How much are you 
 worth?" Occasionally he followed it with one 
 very much more embarrassing in certain quar- 
 ters : "How did you get it?" 
 
 It is not a very usual question, nor perhaps 
 a polite one, but it is a fair one, and we cannot 
 hope to permanently avoid it. How much are 
 you worth? 
 
 The chemist has a ready answer. Suppos- 
 ing you weigh about one hundred and fifty 
 pounds, he can tell you to a cent your material 
 value. A French chemist has figured you out 
 exactly. You are worth about eight dollars! 
 There are in your body enough by-products to 
 make an ordinary iron nail, enough salt to fill 
 an ordinary salt cellar, enough sugar to fill 
 a small sugar bowl, enough lime to whitewash 
 a chicken coop, enough phosphorus to make a 
 dozen matches, enough magnesia for one dose. 
 
 75 
 
76 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 The albumenoids could be used by a tricky 
 baker to replace the whites of a hundred eggs, 
 and there would be fat enough to fill a ten- 
 pound pot. Perhaps if you weigh two hundred 
 pounds you are worth a little more. You are 
 worth about nine dollars and fifty cents. But 
 you will say, "I object to having my value 
 stated in terms of physical by-products." Very 
 well. Step on another scale. 
 
 The 'business man has a ready answer. The 
 average cost of the upbringing of a child from 
 birth to the age of twenty is $4,150 and its 
 average commercial value at that time is 
 $4,000. These figures are based on the net earn- 
 ing capacity of the average citizen for all the 
 gainful occupations in California, capitalized 
 at six per cent interest. As an investment it is 
 estimated that by the age of thirty years the 
 average man is worth $16,000 — $4,000 value, 
 plus $12,000 gross earnings, and has cost $10,- 
 150 to maintain, or a net gain of $5,850 in 
 thirty years. The same figure, $5,000, is about 
 what is awarded by the court when a suit for 
 damages is brought against a railroad for the 
 accidental death of an adult man. 
 
 Now, $5,000 is a good deal more than eight 
 or nine-fifty, but it is not much more satis- 
 
HOW MUCH ARE YOU WORTH ? 77 
 
 factory. Few of us will be content to have 
 ourselves measured by the same measure used 
 for corn and coal. Some one will say, "You 
 can't measure value without brains. It is 
 mental capacity which determines values." So 
 The educator has his answer. It is not so 
 easy to compute by rough processes, but it has 
 alluring suggestions. The artist Millet buys 
 some canvas and a few paints for sixty cents, 
 and paints the "Angelus," which sells for 
 1105,000. Results : raw material, sixty cents ; 
 value of brains, |104,999.40. Pig iron is worth 
 f20 a ton; made into horse shoes, |90; knife 
 blades, |200 ; watch springs, $1,000. Raw ma- 
 terial worth, $20; brains, $980. This looks 
 more like sense — a man is worth what he can 
 do. But to rest value on mental capacity alone 
 is poor calculation. The warden of Sing Sing 
 Prison, in New York, said to a visitor whom 
 he was showing through the prison, "We have 
 here a first-class college faculty. There is 
 not a college subject which could not be well 
 taught by some one of the prisoners." Here 
 was a wealth of mental ability, yet so far from 
 being of value to society, its possessors were 
 so much of a detriment that they had to be 
 restrained by iron gratings. 
 
78 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 The directing force is the final arbiter of a 
 man's worth, and the only valid one. In all 
 these calculations we have only come up by 
 an unfrequented path to the standards of 
 Jesus. A man's worth can never be measured 
 in physical materials or dollars or brains in 
 themselves, but in two terms only — character 
 and service. 
 
 We cannot measure temperature by the 
 pound or men by things. Man is a spirit 
 created capable of a divine fellowship, and the 
 currency of the Kingdom to which he belongs 
 and in which his final value is reckoned is in 
 purposes and ideals. It is computed by the 
 degree to which we live up to the injunction 
 of Burns, 
 
 Where'er you feel your honor grip 
 Let that aye be your border. 
 
 It is reckoned by the unattained to which we 
 reach. 
 
 All I aspired to be and was not 
 Comforts me. That was I worth to God. 
 
 An Indian devotee, who added a large iron 
 ring to his body every year, as a penance, 
 finally weighed so much that the railroads 
 refused to accept him as a passenger and 
 
HOW MUCH ARE YOU WORTH ? 79 
 
 shipped him as freight. There are a great 
 many people, who if they were weighed by 
 what they carry inside of them in the way of 
 character, would go forward as freight. 
 
 Service is the other test. Jesus's parable 
 of the Last Judgment states the truth that 
 worth is to be computed wholly in terms of 
 expenditure. In the world of commerce we 
 compute wealth in surplus and saving. In the 
 Kingdom of God it is figured in things spent — 
 the amount of concrete helpfulness and 
 genuine love we have put into the lives of our 
 brothers. 
 
XV 
 
 THE SURPRISE OF LIFE 
 
 A LITERARY critic has told us that there are 
 only seven original stories in the world and 
 that all others are variations of these seven 
 plots. One of the oldest and most universal 
 of these seven stories is that of the ugly duck- 
 ling, the despised creature of the barnyard, 
 which surprised all the other fowls and itself 
 most of all by turning into the beautiful swan. 
 Cinderella, the delight of all young hearts, is 
 another form of the same tale. It appears in 
 the romantic career of Joseph. It is the tale 
 of the rejected stone which becomes the head 
 of the corner. In a very lofty and reverent 
 sense, it is the story of Him who was despised 
 and rejected of men, but unto whom every 
 knee shall bow and every tongue confess. 
 
 We cherish the tale in all forms, because it 
 does for us a very large service. It pictures 
 life in terms of its surprises. It witnesses to 
 the fact that however humdrum and routine 
 we may allow it to appear, life can never be 
 reduced to exact formulas. No matter how 
 
 80 
 
THE SURPRISE OF LIFE 81 
 
 scientifically we may think and speak of causes 
 and consequences, we make but a poor muddle 
 of our calculations unless we continually 
 allow for a variable "x" — the surprising fact 
 that the race is not always to the swift nor 
 the battle to the strong. All who have lived 
 long and who have given any thoughtful 
 glance back, would agi'ee that one of the 
 strangest features of their lives has been in 
 the unexpected part played by its unnoticed 
 fragments and lightly esteemed remainders. 
 Professor Moore, of Columbia University, 
 spent an honored life as a teacher of lan- 
 guages, doing work of high scholarly value. 
 One afternoon, for the amusement of some 
 children, he wrote some playful little verses 
 beginning, " 'Twas the night before Christmas, 
 and all through the house." All of his learned 
 linguistic works have been forgotten, even 
 by scholars; but the little verses have put on 
 the bloom of immortality. It is only a vivid 
 illustration of the truth that the thing most 
 worth remembrance may be what is thought of 
 least. Real romance is preserved in every life 
 by the constant possibility of surprise. And 
 it works mightily for our encouragement in 
 service. 
 
82 PARES, PLEASE! 
 
 Unpretentious things have a surprising way 
 of counting for more than our most elaborate 
 efforts. How much more is our happiness 
 governed by simple pleasures, simple comforts, 
 and above all, simple goodness, than by our 
 abilities or our cleverness ! Men of the finest 
 native talents are humbled again and again by 
 seeing the much greater accomplishment of 
 men far their inferiors in ingenuity and elo- 
 quence. Carlyle observes, "How much inferior 
 for seeing with is your brightest train of fire- 
 works to the humblest farthing candle!" It 
 has been computed that it would take thirty- 
 seven flashes of lightning to keep a common 
 incandescent lamp burning for one hour. The 
 surprise of life often comes in the greater 
 power there is in the steady glow of faithful- 
 ness and kindness than in the flashes of talent 
 and genius. There was irony in the remark 
 made of a certain minister, that the best pas- 
 sage in his sermon was the passage from the 
 pulpit to the vestry. But the finest passage 
 of even the most eloquent utterance is that 
 which carries the truth out into the intimacies 
 of daily intercourse. 
 
 Unintended things often become the head of 
 the corner. Miss Sullivan, the wonderful 
 
THE SURPRISE OF LIFE 83 
 
 teacher of Helen Keller, records this discovery 
 in a letter written three weeks after beginning 
 her deaf and blind pupil's education: "I am 
 Helen's nurse as well as teacher. I like to 
 have her depend on me for everything, and I 
 find it easier to teach her things at odd mo- 
 ments than at set times." It is a wise dis- 
 covery worthy the remembrance of any 
 teacher. We are apt to consider as our life- 
 work the things done at set times and then 
 stumble on to the strange fact that the "odd 
 moments" have produced as much or more in 
 fruitful results. Life's best things frequently 
 come from its interruptions. The very act of 
 setting about things in a formal way, as 
 though to say, "Here now, I am going to 
 teach you something," or "I am going to do 
 you good," often serves to close the mind we 
 wish to reach; while the unheralded word 
 thrown off in the course of the day's work, 
 and hence real and genuine, carries conviction. 
 Incidental things are a never-ending sur- 
 prise. We are frequently amazed at the small- 
 ness and apparent triviality of the things 
 which people remember about us. We do our 
 work, or make our speeches, and are discon- 
 certed to find that we are not recalled by our 
 
84 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 main performances or public efforts at all. A 
 lady in a Connecticut village told her pastor 
 that all she remembered of a minister who 
 preached there fifty years before, and who 
 since rendered distinguished service as a 
 bishop of the Methodist Church, South, was 
 that two little beads of perspiration always 
 formed on his brow when he preached. Her 
 pastor replied that he would be willing to 
 have every sermon of his forgotten, if the im- 
 pression of earnestness and sincerity were 
 strong enough to span half a century. We 
 work in life's morning for its certainties ; but 
 at evening we shall doubtless rejoice most in 
 its surprises. 
 
XVI 
 
 SAFETY FIRST? 
 
 In Mr. St. John G. Ervine's book of 
 sketches, Eight O'clock and Other Studies, 
 there is an unforgetable character portrait 
 of a Mr. Timms, a clerk in a large London 
 office. The life of Mr. Timms revolved con- 
 tinually around the thought: Supposing that 
 one day he should be unable to work, what 
 should become of him? He would awaken at 
 night, crying out in fear because of some 
 horrible dream in which he saw himself dis- 
 missed from the service of his employers for 
 one reason or another. The same terror was 
 his evil genius by day. So as the years passed, 
 the despotism of this fear took heavy toll of 
 the best possibilities of his life. Something 
 inside of him would urge the quest of adven- 
 tures. "Do something to show that you are 
 alive," it would say, and the fear of endanger- 
 ing his position by some time yielding to one 
 of these moods added another to his many 
 terrors. He thought of marriage, and "the 
 
 85 
 
86 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 thing inside" kept saying, "Risk it, man, risk 
 it!" But the thought of the possibility of 
 getting sick and out of employment, with a 
 wife and perhaps a family to support, drove 
 him back to the dreariness of his dingy bed- 
 sitting room. Finally the inevitable comes; 
 he loses his position and his savings rapidly 
 dwindle. Sickness overtakes him and the 
 doctor's verdict is that he has only a short 
 time to live. The doctor is amazed at the 
 calm which the announcement brings. "Thank 
 God," said Mr. Timms to himself, "I am safe 
 now." In three months he was dead. 
 
 It is a graphic and pathetic picture of the 
 frightful cost of the worship of safety. 
 
 The wide popularity of the industrial 
 slogan "Safety First" has been of immense 
 service in reducing the number of preventable 
 accidents, and has taken on the proportions 
 of a national movement. In which we all re- 
 joice. But this ideal, so eminently fitting for 
 railroad and shop operation, is often trans- 
 ferred and set up as an ideal in a field where 
 it can work only havoc — the world of moral 
 action. 
 
 Safety First is the poorest motto which 
 could possibly be taken for life. We may well 
 
SAFETY FIRST? 87 
 
 ask in these days of slaughter, "Can any good 
 come out of Nietzsche?" But there is- a fine 
 word in his advice, "Live dangerously." He 
 explains it as meaning, "I will try something 
 I have not tried before; I will walk without 
 leading strings; I will work in a fresh 
 medium." In the struggle between the 
 temptation to prefer ease and softness, 
 quietude and safety, to risk, striving, daring, 
 and adventure, the prize of getting the most 
 out of life as well as keeping truest to the pur- 
 poses of God belongs on the side of the daring. 
 Shall my life be ruled by small maxims or 
 by large principles? This is the previous 
 question every one must answer. The cult of 
 the twin gods of Thrift and Prudence has 
 always been a numerous one. Its most in- 
 spired scripture is, "A bird in the hand is 
 worth two in the bush." It loves "practical, 
 hard-headed common sense." It delights in 
 rule of thumb maxims for keeping the eye on 
 the "main chance." It is safe and sane. But 
 it is so hopelessly sane that it overreaches its 
 mark, and a calculating prudence has de- 
 stroyed more souls than prodigal vice. "Where 
 ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise," is 
 sometimes nobly true, for, as Stevenson points 
 
88 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 out, "To be overwise is to ossify; and the 
 scruple-monger ends by standing stock still. 
 Who, if he were wisely considerate of things 
 at large, would ever embark on any work much 
 more considerable than a penny postcard?" 
 Can any risk in life be more hazardous than 
 that of spending it making tame and dull little 
 "half -penny postcards," when it might be made 
 a living epistle of noble exploits? 
 
 Take friendship, for instance. How shall 
 we deal with the alternate courses of risk and 
 safety and risk there? The achievement of a 
 fine friendship is one of the most worthful 
 undertakings of life. But every true friend- 
 ship is a risk. It lays our lives open to costly 
 liabilities. So Prudence whispers in our ears : 
 "Be not friendly overmuch. Be pleasant, 
 cordial; cultivate the acquaintance of people 
 who ^count.' But be careful. Don't allow 
 your heart-strings to get such a firm half -hitch 
 around another person that you can't let go 
 while you are on the safe side of trouble. If 
 you get in too deep, it is liable to cost you 
 discomfort and money, and perhaps hurt your 
 reputation." This is the siren voice which 
 many follow to the barren rocks of selfishness. 
 So they are safe — they avoid the risks, and 
 
SAFETY FIRST? 89 
 
 miss the finest joy life has to offer — the gener- 
 ous and unealculating thrill of a loving heart. 
 Then they wonder, very often, why life grows 
 flat and stale. So by staying indoors we can 
 avoid the risk of catching cold; but we will 
 also miss the glory of the sunrise, the swing of 
 the cloud in the midsummer sky, the subtile 
 witchery of the twilight — ^in a word, life. 
 
 The service of Christ is a large risk. When 
 anyone gives himself sincerely to a real bit of 
 work in the church or Kingdom, he verily 
 takes up a cross. It will surely cost money 
 and toil. The chances are it will also mean 
 misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and 
 friction. Seeing only what is near, men side- 
 step the task. On the altar of Safety, the 
 privilege of being a colaborer with God is 
 ruthlessly sacrificed. Is it worth it? In 
 every field — in politics, in social service — 
 the same interplay of risk and safety is seen. 
 In every one is the brave entry made in the 
 journal of the first minister in New England 
 on the voyage across the Atlantic, eternally 
 true — "Those that love their owne chimney 
 corner and dare not fare beyond their owne 
 towne's end, shall never have the honor to see 
 the wonderful workes of God." 
 
XVII 
 
 WHAT DO YOU EXPECT YOUR CHURCH 
 TO DO FOR YOU? 
 
 This question makes a large assumption 
 which is not always justified by any means. 
 Many expect nothing of their church. They 
 bring to it no earnest expectation of its doing 
 anything definite, and they get just about 
 what they bring — nothing. Tennyson^s 
 "Northern Farmer" had a blurred experience 
 at church which is a common one: 
 
 An' I never knowed what he meaned, but I thowt he 'ad 
 
 summat to say. 
 An' I thowt he said whot he owt to 'a said, an' I coom'd 
 
 awaay. 
 
 It is significant that on several occasions when 
 Jesus did any works of healing he deemed it 
 important to have a clear answer to the ques- 
 tion, "What wilt thou have me to do?" The 
 extent and clearness of expectation often 
 determines the extent and concreteness of 
 benefit. 
 
 There are some things which we have no 
 90 
 
WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? 91 
 
 right to expect our church to do for us. It 
 cannot save us. This is an obvious truth, but 
 we should not forget that it has not always 
 been so, nor is it to-day to multitudes of Chris- 
 tians. With a great price has this freedom 
 been obtained for us. Nor can the church 
 automatically improve us. This is not so 
 clearly held in mind. It is easy to slip into 
 the unconscious feeling that church-going 
 works some kind of an automatic charm. We 
 live in an age when so much is done for us 
 by clever mechanical contrivances. Edison 
 says the future is to be an age of buttons — 
 simply press on the right button and dismiss 
 the matter from your mind. We can cook 
 breakfast in bed to music from the automatic 
 piano. We do our housework with vacuum 
 cleaners and electric irons, while the fireless 
 cooker is getting dinner. All of which in- 
 creases the temptation to think of spiritual 
 things in automatic terms. 
 
 If we will swiftly glance at what their con- 
 tact with Jesus brought to three widely differ- 
 ent men, we will discover three things which 
 are permanent elements of what we ought to 
 expect of our church. 
 
 The first is the Blind Man. His answer to 
 
92 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 Jesus's question, "What wilt thou have me to 
 do?" was a definite one — "Lord, that I may 
 receive my sight." We have a right to expect 
 vision. There was organized a few years ago 
 among people aroused by the miseries of pre- 
 ventable blindness, a society with a name as 
 noble as its purpose — "The Society for the 
 Conservation of Vision." That is just what 
 the Christian Church is. It exists to wipe 
 out the misery caused by preventable moral 
 and spiritual blindness, and more particu- 
 larly, to prevent it. If the wires are the sensi- 
 tive nerves of a city, the parks its lungs, and 
 the railroads its gigantic arms, its <ihurches 
 are its eyes, its watchtowers and hills of 
 vision, which pierce through the smoke and 
 grime and the fog of bewilderment to the 
 Eternal. As a workman complained recently, 
 "We work all day to make money and half 
 the night to spend it; what we need is some 
 one to tell us what it is all about." 
 
 But "vision" is an abstract and rather 
 vague word. Schools, homes, and political 
 institutions give vision. Expectation must be 
 focused more closely. Three Greeks went to 
 church one day in Jerusalem with a definite 
 expectation which was met — "Sir, we would 
 
WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? 93 
 
 see Jesus." That is still the supreme thing 
 our church should do for us. When we get a 
 real vision of Him who above all others saw 
 life steadily and saw it whole, we are able to 
 take up its tangled threads and weave anew. 
 
 The second man is Peter. His contact with 
 Jesus evoked a strange cry — "Depart from me, 
 for I am a sinful man." That same contact 
 should bring to us continually rebuke. We 
 do not like rebuke. It is much more pleasant 
 to hear smooth sayings. It is a common 
 remark to hear, "I go to church to be com- 
 forted." And a right thing. But if we are 
 always comforted at church, if we always 
 enjoy the sermon, something is radically 
 wrong. The sword of Christ which would 
 destroy our superficial peace and shallow con- 
 tent has never left the scabbard. It was a fine 
 compliment that Louis XIV paid to Massil- 
 lon: "I have heard several great orators and 
 have been much pleased with them; as for 
 every time I hear you, I am much displeased 
 with myself." Before Christ can touch the 
 deepest level in man the man must be made 
 thoroughly uncomfortable and discontented. 
 When we cease measuring ourselves by the 
 petty standards of our neighbors or our own 
 
94 PARES, PLEASE! 
 
 mean achievements, and really see Jesus, we 
 feel the keen edge of a spiritual hunger. 
 
 The third man is Matthew, Contact with 
 Christ for him meant inspiration and immedi- 
 ate action. "He arose and followed him." If 
 we come ready to receive and cherish those 
 high words of Jesus — ^his great imperatives, 
 "Come," "Be," "Do," "Go"— we shall never 
 find him to fail us. He brings the freshness of 
 the heroic. Men are won not by premises or 
 even by conclusions. They respond to the 
 trumpet tones. A young soldier on a hospital 
 cot pleaded with the doctor, "O, don't say I'm 
 not fit for duty. It's only a touch of fever, and 
 the sound of the bugle will make me well." 
 The church which speaks the word of her Mas- 
 ter always brings the medicine of the bugle. 
 
XVIII 
 
 WHAT DOES YOUR CHURCH EXPECT 
 OF YOU? 
 
 It is a sad but common mistake to imagine 
 that we ever add to the permanent attractive- 
 ness of the church by minimizing or slurring 
 over its costly demands and expectations. It 
 is true, of course, that a church should be the 
 most attractive place in any community. All 
 that can be brought to it of fellowship, music, 
 and inspiration, should be there as the fine 
 gold of the sanctuary, adorning the doctrine 
 of God. But it is a great blunder to think we 
 ever make the church attractive by hiding the 
 truth that at its center is not a flower garden 
 but a cross. No one ever desired so passion- 
 ately to win adherents as did Jesus, and yet 
 he seemed to fear nothing so much as that 
 people would get the impression that he was 
 asking them to go on a picnic, a sort of rollick- 
 ing pleasure trip down to Jerusalem, where 
 the great rewards would be distributed. He 
 could do more with twelve men who joined 
 
 95 
 
96 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 him with a real sense of his conditions than 
 with five thousand who would make him King 
 because they had enjoyed a free dinner. There 
 is keen truth in the satire of Sam Jones that 
 the saying of Jesus, "If any man will come 
 after me, let him deny himself, and take up 
 his cross and follow me," is frequently inter- 
 preted as though it meant, "If any man will 
 come after me, let him enjoy himself, and take 
 up his ice-cream freezer and follow me." 
 
 Your church expects you to believe in it. 
 Which is a very different thing from patroniz- 
 ing it, or giving it your cordial good wishes, 
 or even filling up your Duplex envelope every 
 Sunday. It means to believe that it has a 
 mission in nourishing men's lives that nothing 
 else can possibly replace. It expects you to 
 believe in it as the architect believes in the 
 steel frame of his skyscraper, or the engineer 
 believes in the girders of his bridge ; or, to take 
 a far more suitable figure, as the farmer be- 
 lieves in rain. He may get along without 
 paint on his barns; he may manage without 
 a self-binder or a steam plow ; but he does need 
 commerce with the sky in the form of rain. So 
 the conviction that the soul of man needs the 
 life of God must be equally regnant. 
 
WHAT DOES CHURCH EXPECT? 97 
 
 Religion's all or nothing; it's no mere smile 
 
 Of contentment, sigh of aspiration, sir, 
 
 No quality of the finely tempered clay 
 
 Like its whiteness or its lightness; rather stuff 
 
 Of the very stuff; life of life, and self of self. 
 
 It is true that the groves were God's first 
 temples and that man can worship his Maker 
 anywhere. But it is also true that the man 
 who will worship everywhere is the man who 
 has learned to worship somewhere, "Look out 
 for that man," some one said of young Robes- 
 pierre. "He's dangerous. He believes what 
 he says." Your church expects "dangerous" 
 believers. 
 
 It expects you to prove it. That is not to 
 write a book of apologetics. The fundamental 
 demand of the church on each one of us is not 
 this detailed piece of service or that, however 
 important it may be, but to prove its authority 
 by our exposition of the kind of life it can 
 create. We are expected to be living proofs 
 of the ability of the gospel through the church 
 to create character. We frequently hear 
 people speak of doing church work and find 
 that they refer to baking pies and sewing 
 quilts, work that is not distinctly religious at 
 all. "Men will wrangle for religion, work for 
 
98 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 it, write for it, fight for it, die for it, do every- 
 thing but live for it." The primary religious 
 work is to live in the power of the Christian 
 evangel. 
 
 Your church expects you to project it. Arch- 
 bishop Whately was still the logician when 
 he said, "Either give up your religion or 
 propagate it." There is no middle course. 
 The last paragraph of every effective sermon 
 must always be made up of actions on the part 
 of the congregation. Our church has a right 
 to expect its impulse to travel down to our 
 feet and make of us "souls in motion." In 
 1864, when Lee's army had entered Pennsyl- 
 vania, a citizen of Philadelphia telegraphed 
 General Halleck at Washington to know if he 
 could be of any service in that vicinity. He 
 received this grim reply : "We have five times 
 as many generals as we want, but we are 
 greatly in need of privates. Any one volun- 
 teering in that capacity will be thankfully re- 
 ceived." 
 
 "Greatly in need of privates!" Plenty of 
 volunteers for the seats of the mighty, but the 
 earnest expectation of the church waiteth for 
 the appearance of its "private projectors." 
 
XIX 
 
 THE HIGHEST HEREDITY 
 
 The phrase belongs to that maker of splen- 
 did phrases, David Starr Jordan. The most 
 determining factor in every man's inheritance 
 is not that which he gets from his grandfather 
 but what he gets from himself. Every man is 
 his own most important ancestor. 
 
 The nineteenth century gave us two dra- 
 matic literary pictures of heredity in striking 
 contrast. One of them was Ibsen's Ghosts. 
 It is a play full of characteristic Scandinavian 
 gloom, showing the progress to tragic climaxes 
 of a group of people under the relentless auto- 
 matic control of the spent passions of their 
 ancestors. It is full of a morbid fatalism, 
 depicting a world where men move under the 
 hopeless control of a dead hand. Its philoso- 
 phy chains up human freedom in the meshes 
 of an iron necessity more binding than the 
 most rigid kind of foreordination ever con- 
 ceived. 
 
 Mary Wollstonecraf t Shelley pictures a very 
 99 
 
100 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 different kind of force, still terrible, still un- 
 escapable, but with a very different kind of 
 source. Her Frankenstein tells the story of 
 a student who constructed out of the frag- 
 ments of bodies picked from churchyards and 
 dissecting rooms a human form without a soul. 
 The monster had muscular strength, animal 
 passions, and an active life, but no "breath of 
 divinity." It longed for animal love and sym- 
 pathy but was shunned by all. For a time it 
 followed obediently the dictates of its master, 
 but gradually got away from his control, till 
 finally, so far from being his servant, it be- 
 comes his ruler. It was most powerful for 
 evil, and being fully conscious of its own de- 
 fects and deformities, sought with persistency 
 to inflict retribution on the young student who 
 had called it into being. 
 
 Mrs. Shelley did not write Frankenstein 
 primarily as an allegory but as a wild and 
 powerful romance. It is all the more effective 
 as a work of art in that it draws no lessons. 
 The tragic movement of the tale is a living 
 representation of the way a man's days and 
 years gradually build up within a force of 
 character whose movements he finally does not 
 direct but obey. Christ's last words to Peter, 
 

 THE HIGHEST fiMEDIti' ' ^ lOl 
 
 as recorded by John, have a startling, though 
 wholly unintended application to the realm of 
 character-building through habit formation: 
 "When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself 
 and walkedst whither thou wouldest ; but when 
 thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy 
 hands and another shall gird thee and carry 
 thee whither thou wouldest not." The "other" 
 who finally girds and carries us is the un- 
 conscious force which our yesterdays have 
 created and placed on the throne. 
 
 ,The heredity we receive from others is never 
 to be lightly regarded. The twentieth century 
 is young, barely entered on its adolescence, yet 
 it has already added distinctly to our knowl- 
 edge and appreciation of the importance and 
 laws of heredity. The whole new science of 
 eugenics has been marked out and pretty well 
 staked off in fifteen years. The future will 
 give not less but more importance to the 
 problems of heredity than ever before. But 
 no possible advance in our knowledge of an- 
 cestral heredity will ever subtract from the 
 truth that it is from ourselves that we receive 
 the most determining inheritance. The classic 
 pictures of "The Three Fates," blindly spin- 
 ning and cutting the thread of life, is an 
 
%j^^i>H} FAKES', PLEASE ! 
 
 anachronism. We handle the shears for our- 
 selves. The man of forty is under the "grip 
 of a dead hand," but it is not so much that 
 of his father as that of the boy of fifteen or 
 twenty that he used to be. It is "the vanished 
 yesterdays" which are the tyrants of to-mor- 
 row. Ruskin declares, with a fine appre- 
 ciation of this truth, that he had rather 
 hear people speak of thoughtless old age, than 
 indulgently excuse "the thoughtlessness of 
 youth." "Youth thoughtless, when the career 
 of all his days depends on the chances or 
 passions of an hour or the opportunities of 
 a moment! A youth thoughtless, when his 
 every act is as a torch to the laid train of 
 future conduct, and every imagination a foun- 
 tain of life and death! Be thoughtless in 
 future years rather than now, though, indeed, 
 there is only one place where a man may be 
 nobly thoughtless — his deathbed." 
 
 There is only one real ghost who will ever 
 haunt us. It is the vision of the man we might 
 have been. In our brightest success and most 
 abject failure he will be there, with a sad and 
 wistful glance. The action of to-day, so appar- 
 ently insignificant in itself, is determining 
 whether we will leave to the man we will be 
 
THE HIGHEST HEREDITY 103 
 
 to-morrow the fine inheritance of a mind un- 
 spoiled by dissipation, trained to think and 
 act, or whether we will throw away his inherit- 
 ance before he has had a chance to touch it. 
 
 "The highest heredity" is, at bottom, a great 
 message of hope. To think that the limits of 
 possibility are finally set at birth makes for 
 inertia, irresponsibility, and despair. But to 
 know that to-day we are creating our own 
 to-morrow is a sobering and ennobling inspira- 
 tion. 
 
 One ship goes east, another west. 
 
 By the selfsame winds that blow; 
 'Tis the set of the sail, and not the gale, 
 
 That determines the way they go. 
 
 Never should this subject be left, however, 
 without the remembrance that in addition to 
 being the heirs of all the ages and of ourselves, 
 we are "joint heirs with Jesus Christ." We 
 are not left to work out our own salvation as a 
 lonely tour-de-force ^ for it is God which 
 worketh in us to will and to do of his good 
 pleasure. 
 
XX 
 
 CARRIED OVER FROM CHILDHOOD- 
 LIABILITIES 
 
 The glory of Christianity lies in the things 
 it carries over from childhood. The fellow- 
 ship of real Christians who have entered the 
 Kingdom as little children and have kept those 
 traits is the most youthful place in the world, 
 as it is certainly the most glorious. 
 
 But not all the remainders of childhood are 
 on the credit side. Some are distinct liabili- 
 ties, over which a watchful eye must be kept. 
 In the church we are sure to find some of the 
 qualities of childhood, which, above all things 
 else, called forth Jesus's most enthusiastic 
 praise. In the church as well, however, we 
 are unfortunately apt to find some things 
 carried over from childhood which are large 
 subtractions from its possible power. Three 
 phrases, which are a part of the memory of 
 everyone, perhaps represent better than any- 
 thing else some attitudes which are responsible 
 for big loss. 
 
 104 
 
CARKIED OVER LIABILITIES 105 
 
 1. ^^Now I lay me down to sleep/' Pity the 
 man to whom these unforgetable words do 
 not embody the most sacred memories of life ! 
 They are universally freighted with the most 
 tender associations, and it would be a ruth- 
 less hand which should seek to pluck them 
 out of their place. But aside from their tender 
 memories, these childhood words may well 
 stand for a soporific attitude and intent all 
 too common in the life of the church. It is all 
 too common for men to leave behind that alert 
 and vigilant wakefulness which characterizes 
 them in their business life — the qui vive so 
 necessary there — when they enter the worship 
 and service of the church, and instead of sum- 
 moning all their faculties together, they lay 
 themselves down to slumber on a child's crib. 
 Too many of our prayers begin, "Now I lay 
 me down to sleep." A man's-size prayer runs 
 more like this : 
 
 Now I get me up to wake, 
 
 I pray the Lord my soul to shake. 
 
 "Why,'' exclaims Sydney Smith, "should we 
 call in paralysis to the aid of piety?'' A young 
 minister from the West coming to a small New 
 England parish, noticed on his first Sunday 
 
106 FAKES, PLEASE! 
 
 that instead of the bell being rung in the man- 
 ner to which he had been accustomed, it was 
 tolled as for a funeral. He wondered who was 
 dead, and at church time he found out. They 
 were all dead. The deacons crept up the aisles 
 like polar bears. The singing was what one 
 would expect from Mrs. Jarley's wax works. 
 The Sunday school was a fine demonstration 
 of somnambulism. Very often the grand old 
 words of the hymn bring to us quite a different 
 sense than the one intended : 
 
 On the Rock of Ages founded. 
 What can shake thy sure repose? 
 
 There is a provision in the Mosaic law 
 against offering to the Lord a deformed ram 
 or a sick ewe. Shall we offer to him any bet- 
 ter, our hours of drowsiness, and reserve the 
 wide-awake ones for the Board of Trade? By 
 all means remember the evening prayer of 
 childhood, but keep even a little clearer the 
 ringing words of Isaiah, "Awake ! Awake ! O 
 Zion! Put on thy strength! Shake thyself 
 from the dust!'' 
 
 2. ^^You in your little corner and I in mine/^ 
 The words suggest the little reed organ in the 
 primary room and the eager chorus of youthful 
 
CARKIED OVER LIABILITIES 107 
 
 voices. Happy the church to which they sug- 
 gest nothing else ! Sometimes they inevitably 
 suggest something by no means so inspiring — 
 a lack of real cooperation between members 
 and societies, so that whatever prosecution of 
 the work there is is a case of you in your 
 "little corner and I in mine." It may be a case 
 of too many Caesars who care more about being 
 first in the little Alpine village of some par- 
 ticular branch of work than second or third in 
 the larger Rome. It may be simply the lack 
 of a common vision which results in the differ- 
 ent organizations of the church moving like 
 a group of camp followers, instead of march- 
 ing with the orderly swing of an army. With- 
 out the thought of the larger whole they fre- 
 quently duplicate, compete, and tread on one 
 another's toes and even work at cross pur- 
 poses. The result is a sad loss of energy and 
 momentum. One of Kipling's finest stories 
 is that of "the ship that found herself." In 
 it he puts what is his one great message — the 
 victory of discipline and organization over 
 individualism and anarchy. The ship is mak- 
 ing her first voyage and the different parts 
 assert themselves in clamorous voices, each 
 claiming its right to pull its own way and 
 
108 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 complaining of the other parts. Finally a new 
 voice speaks, which none of the parts recog- 
 nize. It is the voice of the ship herself, the 
 larger whole to which the parts belong. As 
 they listen to that voice and own its authority 
 harmony comes out of the confusion and the 
 ship "finds herself." In the epistles of the 
 New Testament we find the story of a church 
 that found herself, "the unity of the Spirit in 
 the bond of peace." As a church draws out 
 from their isolated corners its various forces 
 to the center of a common related purpose it 
 forms for conquest. 
 
 3. ^^Ene, mene^ mine, mo/' Who does not 
 remember the childish incantation of our 
 games? It meant absolutely nothing to us. 
 We knew nothing of its origin or purpose. Yet 
 its rhythmic recitation gave us an undeniable 
 satisfaction. It stands for the traditional 
 repetition of ideas we have not possessed, or 
 acts whose usefulness we have not investi- 
 gated. A father asked his little boy recently 
 what he had learned at school that day. He 
 answered, "Gesind." On his father's mystifica- 
 tion, he explained it. "Two gesind four twice ; 
 two gesind six three times; two gesind eight 
 four times." That was all — "gesind" — words 
 
CARRIED OVER LIABILITIES 109 
 
 without meaning, whose significance he had 
 never possessed at alL Yet it is not uncom- 
 mon, in much the same manner, to let the pub- 
 lic preaching of the truth become a substitute 
 for its possession by personal appropriation 
 in our own lives. Often, too, our service is 
 determined by what has been rather than what 
 ought to be, decided by a fresh facing of our 
 situation in an unconventional way. Doug- 
 lass Jerrold said, "Some men can never relish 
 a full moon, out of respect for that venerable 
 institution, the old one." 
 
 "When I became a man I put away childish 
 things.'' 
 
XXI 
 
 "THE WILL" 
 
 In his powerful and poignant little half- 
 hour play entitled The Will, James M. Barrie 
 has traced the growth of that strange and 
 fatal sickness of the soul called Greed. The 
 whole action takes place in a London solici- 
 tor's office to which a man comes three times, 
 at intervals separated by about twenty years, 
 for the purpose of making his will. The cen- 
 tral character, Philip Ross, a young office 
 clerk, possessed of a small legacy, is accom- 
 panied by his youthful and loving bride. She 
 is weeping hysterically at the mere suggestion 
 of an instrument so grisly and harrowing as 
 a will. Her husband wishes to make the will 
 in a single sentence leaving everything of 
 which he dies possessed to his wife. She lov- 
 ingly protests at being the sole beneficiary, and 
 after much wrangling carries the point of 
 having two of her husband's cousins provided 
 with a hundred pounds a year out of the estate, 
 and also of leaving one hundred pounds to a 
 
 110 
 
"THE WILL" 111 
 
 convalescent home. The lawyer is amused but 
 touched as well. "You are a ridiculous 
 couple," he tells them, "but don't change, espe- 
 cially if you get on in the world." "No fear," 
 is the light-hearted answer from both. 
 
 Twenty years later they are in the same 
 room again for the same purpose, to make a 
 new will disposing of an estate of seventy 
 thousand pounds. Philip Ross is now one of 
 the rising merchants of London. His wife, a 
 woman of forty, sure of herself, not so much 
 dressed, says Barrie, as "richly upholstered," 
 has come on her own initiative to see that her 
 husband does "nothing foolish." There is a 
 hot- worded war over the husband's determina- 
 tion to leave his wife a life interest in the 
 estate instead of outright possession. Each 
 refers to it as "my money." The old tender 
 solicitude which the lawyer had found at once 
 so ridiculous and charming is gone. "One 
 would think you were afraid of my marrying 
 again," she reproaches him. "One would think 
 you were looking for my dying," he angrily 
 retorts. The allowance to the elderly cousins 
 in poverty is at her instance reduced from one 
 hundred to fifty pounds. She objects to his 
 leaving a thousand pounds to a hospital as 
 
112 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 unnecessary, but he clings to a bequest of five 
 hundred pounds, because he wants to make a 
 "splash in hospitals." 
 
 On the last visit Sir Philip Eoss, now 
 knighted, comes alone. His wife is dead and 
 he comes to cancel all previous wills, especially 
 for the purpose of cutting off without a penny 
 his two children. The son has proved a 
 "rotter," to use the father's own term, and the 
 daughter has run away and married against 
 his wishes. He starts to dictate to the lawyer. 
 "I leave it — leave it — my God ! I don't know 
 what to do with it." Then in a fit of swelling 
 anger he shouts to the lawyer, "Here are the 
 names of the half dozen men I've fought with 
 most for gold, and I've beaten them. Draw 
 up my will leaving all my money to be divided 
 among them, with my respectful curses, and 
 I'll sign it." 
 
 One of the minor characters in the first 
 scene is an old clerk in the office, who has just 
 been told by his physician that he has an in- 
 curable cancer. He repeats to his employer 
 the doctor's comment about it. "There is a 
 spot of that kind in pretty near all of us, and 
 if we don't look out it does for us in the end. 
 He calls it the accursed thing, and I think he 
 
"THE WILL" 113 
 
 meant we should know of it and be on the 
 watch." This reference to a cancer spot 
 Barrie uses most effectively at the end of the 
 story as a fine and delicate symbolism for 
 Greed. 
 
 Barrie did not write this searching parable 
 fot* millionaires. They face, no doubt in 
 complicated and excessive form, a peril of 
 riches that Jesus ever pointed out. It is a 
 sickness of the soul whose risk of infection we 
 cannot avoid by the simple means of failing 
 to amass wealth ; it is one of the common ills 
 whose risk all flesh is heir to. 
 
 We are amazed, when we look into it, at the 
 number of the words of Jesus which deal with 
 the getting and spending of wealth. They 
 form so large a part of the body of his teach- 
 ing as almost to suggest a lack of a proper 
 sense of proportion in the writers of the Gos- 
 pels. But nothing else stands as clearer evi- 
 dence that he knew what was in man. 
 
 One of the great pictures on the walls of 
 the Boston Public Library is Abbey's rich and 
 colorful painting of Sir Galahad's fight with 
 the Seven Deadly Sins. Murder, lust, intem- 
 perance, and the flagrant passions of the flesh 
 in their onslaught against the soul, are nobly 
 
114 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 delineated. But the picture of the deadly sins 
 as Jesus draws it in the Gospels is a very dif- 
 ferent one. To him the deadliest sins were 
 those of the disposition, the cold hardness of 
 greed, unteachable pride, and selfish un- 
 brotherliness. These sins are more incurable 
 because they are less easily discovered. Any 
 man knows when he has been drunk, but who 
 is able to place his finger on the moment when 
 the miasma of covetousness touches him? The 
 sins of the mind and disposition wreck the 
 very means by which guilt can be 'determined. 
 The light, which should show the darkness, 
 becomes darkness itself. 
 
 A writer in Harper's Weekly in commenting 
 on Barriers play said if only a man would 
 arise who could make Barrie's preachment 
 effective and really rid our lives of greed, he 
 would be the great liberator whom all the 
 world waits to acclaim. 
 
 Why wait? 
 
 "Philip findeth Nathanael and saith unto 
 him. We have found him." The Messiah is 
 here, the liberator from greed, who can train 
 us to overcome evil with the positive good of 
 a life which radiates from a living center of 
 love. 
 
XXII . 
 "DUTCH COURAGE" 
 
 All the explosions in the great world war 
 have been of shrapnel or torpedoes. Hoary 
 ideas have gone up with a bang. The explo- 
 sion of many of the time-honored delusions 
 must be set down to the credit side of the stag- 
 gering tragedy which has made the month of 
 August, 1914, forever memorable. The elo- 
 quent argument of the sufficiency of commerce 
 as an insurance of world peace will never 
 again impose on the childlike credulity of 
 millions of people. It has been blasted into a 
 million fragments. Nor will the world ever 
 rest its hope in the progress of "culture" as 
 a guarantee of humanity. Like Humpty 
 Dumpty it has fallen never to rise again. 
 
 Not least among these happy explosions has 
 been the passing of the tradition of alcohol 
 as an aid to military efficiency. While most 
 of the words of the New Testament seem to 
 have been buried clear out of sight, one of 
 them has dawned on the governments of 
 
 115 
 
116 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 Europe as never before — "If thine hand offend 
 thee, cut it off.'' Both despotism and democ- 
 racy have made a ruthless war on intoxication. 
 In the field, particularly, the ancient faith of 
 many commanders in the value of "Dutch 
 courage," which term denotes the artificial 
 bravado created by semi-intoxication, has been 
 wholly discounted. This is a war of the 
 trenches, in which victory depends not on the 
 sudden charge of half-crazed men, but on the 
 long endurance and sure marksmanship of the 
 gunners. One of the last public utterances 
 of Lord Roberts, was that in his judgment 
 eight tenths of the value of a soldier depended 
 on his efficiency as a shot. This is a field 
 where the "courage" induced by alcohol is 
 ruinous. The war is being fought by sober 
 men. Deeper and more lasting sources of 
 courage than that of the distillery have been 
 sought and found. 
 
 This newer philosophy of the culture of 
 courage is highly significant for all other 
 aspects of life. "Dutch courage," or the false 
 daring and bravado, created either by stimu- 
 lants or by false views of life which act like 
 intoxicants, is miserably insufficient for the 
 long run where victory turns on endurance. 
 
"DUTCH COURAGE'' 117 
 
 The life that wins is not a Charge of the Light 
 Brigade, but an inch-by-inch campaign in 
 trenches, and its lasting "nerve" must come 
 from the deepest springs. 
 
 Intoxicants and drugs furnish a deceptive 
 and abnormal courage for many. They are 
 "brave" for the battle in the pathetic manner 
 of Tam o'Shanter : 
 
 Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious. 
 O'er all the ills of life victorious. 
 
 Poor Tam ! It was the kind of courage that 
 always oozes out at the finger tips. Men nerve 
 themselves for some particular effort with 
 what they call a "pick-me-up," only to find it 
 a "throw-me-down" at the critical time. We 
 have gone far when we have learned that 
 nature does not relish any jokes played on the 
 nervous system. The terrible revenge of na- 
 ture against the "jokes" of artificial stimula- 
 tion is that finally the system fails to respond 
 at all. 
 
 Rosy and superficial views of life are the 
 means by which a "fighting front" is main- 
 tained by others. They overcome evil by the 
 deliciously simple expedient of the ostrich — 
 looking the other way. Christian Science 
 
118 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 keeps its devotees keyed up by denying .the 
 existence of evil. New Thought tells us to 
 keep our mind so occupied with pink and 
 yellow thoughts that the ugly black and blue 
 ones can never hurt us. Both of them make 
 as satisfactory equipment for the realities of 
 life as a picnic lunch would be for a six- 
 months' campaign. 
 
 Mere motion is another common resort for 
 keeping up the spirits. Only keep life spin- 
 ning fast enough with different things and all 
 will be well. Thoughtlessness is made the 
 measure of its buoyancy. An old and battered 
 top will look a bright red so long as it is 
 spinning fast; only when it stops does its real 
 dinginess appear. So an artificial thoughtless- 
 ness due to mere activity often passes for "the 
 red badge of courage." 
 
 Lasting valor for the long campaign comes 
 only from within. The secret of it is in that 
 word in the Psalms, "I have nourished thee 
 from the great depths." 
 
 The consciousness of the presence and power 
 of God is necessary for true courage. "Had 
 it not been for thee, my soul had dwelt in 
 silence." The Cardinal Legate at Augsburg 
 said to Luther, "Do you expect your princes 
 
"DUTCH COURAGE" 119 
 
 to take up arms to defend a wretched worm 
 like you? I tell you, No ! And where will you 
 be then?" Luther calmly replied, "Right 
 where I am now, in the hands of Almighty 
 God." 
 
 The possession of truth is an unfailing 
 spring. Make our lives part of the truth and 
 purpose which is larger than our personal 
 aims, and we destroy the paralyzing hesitation 
 of self-consciousness. The heroic valor of the 
 trenches of northern France, on both sides, 
 came from the feeling in the breasts of the 
 men that they were part of a larger and more 
 glorious thing than themselves — the nation. 
 When we can say truly, "To this end am I 
 come, that I might bear witness to the truth," 
 w^e have the spirit which enabled the Master to 
 face the power of Rome itself without a quiver. 
 
 Love of men completes courage. It was the 
 large source of the fearlessness of Jesus. He 
 believed so deeply in men, loved so strongly 
 the best that was in them, that he was never 
 afraid of their worst. When we really love 
 men we are delivered from the fear of acting 
 for their best good. 
 
XXIII 
 
 HIGHHANDED TYRANNY 
 
 Tyranny has never been popular in 
 America. "When a long train of abuses and 
 usurpations, pursuing invariably the same 
 object, evinces a design to reduce them under 
 absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their 
 duty, to throw off such government and to 
 provide new guards for their future security." 
 These are the glowing words of the Declara- 
 tion of Independence. The spirit of the men 
 who risked their lives in signing that docu- 
 ment has been bred into the very bone of later 
 generations. We have kept the form and, to 
 a very large degree, the substance of that pro- 
 test against absolutism. But of late the 
 national conscience has been deeply stirred by 
 the evidences of what is known as "invisible 
 government." Under the forms of the popular 
 will there has developed a malign and unseen 
 machinery of "influence" which has exerted a 
 guiding hand on legislation. We have been 
 called to a fresh crusade for some kind of a 
 
 120 
 
HIGH-HANDED TYRANNY 121 
 
 "new freedom" from the domination of large 
 vested interests, to reestablish the reality as 
 well as the forms of popular government, a 
 crusade which is perhaps the most hopeful 
 movement of our time. 
 
 To bring it ultimate success we need an 
 assertion of freedom that runs far deeper than 
 the freeing of legislation. The worst kind of 
 invisible government of a people is that which 
 is still more "invisible" than the manipula- 
 tions of a large trust. It is the subtle and 
 insidious high-handed tyranny of popular 
 ideals and commercial standards which throw 
 around the moral and spiritual independence 
 of the individual a shackling despotism. It 
 consists of such intangible elements as ways 
 of looking at things and standards of value, 
 but which, like the unseen pull of gravitation, 
 are powerful in concrete results. 
 
 There is a far extended tyranny of bigness 
 which infects the spirit with the deadly sure- 
 ness of the typhoid germ. G. W. Stevens, in 
 his book of incisive comment on America, The 
 Land of the Dollar, tells of having a creamer 
 explained to him. " ^It is not yet finished,' the 
 owner was saying, ^but when it is, I antici- 
 pate' — I shuddered, for I knew what was com- 
 
122 FARES, PLExiSE! 
 
 ing — ^it will be the best and the largest in the 
 world.' When shall I ever escape this 
 tyranny of the biggest thing in the world?" 
 Such tyranny shows in the practical accept- 
 ance of the idea, whether the bald theory 
 would be agreed to or not, that the quantity 
 of an action, a business or result of any kind, 
 somehow makes up for its quality. W. J. 
 Bryan says there are three kinds of larceny — 
 petty larceny, grand larceny, and glorious 
 larceny. "Glorious larceny" is thieving on 
 such a large scale that its brilliant success 
 atones for its moral crookedness. The popular 
 acclaim which mere bigness wins trickles down 
 into the minds of multitudes who are acting 
 on a much smaller scale and gives values a 
 pernicious twist. In The Turmoil Booth Tark- 
 ington has put the creed of the rampant and 
 dingy commercialism of a Western city in this 
 form: 
 
 Give me of Thyself, O Bigness; 
 
 Power to get more Power; 
 
 Riches to get more Riches; 
 
 Give me of thy sweat to get more sweat 
 
 Give me of thy Bigness to get more Bigness for 
 
 myself, 
 O Bigness, for thine is the Power and the Glory 
 And there is no end but Bigness, for ever and ever. 
 
HIGH-HANDED TYRANNY 123 
 
 ^^The new Freedom" most devoutly to be 
 desired is that quality in man which declines 
 to be overawed by conventional greatness and 
 goes ahead and does its individual best, with- 
 out making the silent surrender of quality to 
 size. 
 
 Hurry is a ruthless tyrannizer. We have 
 barely begun to recover from an era of waste- 
 ful pioneering when men were in such a hurry 
 to secure the land and use it that all thought of 
 conserving anything for future use was for- 
 gotten. The attitude to posterity was that of 
 Sir Boyle Roche, who said in the House of 
 Commons : "Why should we care for posterity? 
 What has posterity done for us?" The subway 
 guard tells us in the morning to "Step lively !" 
 and we listen to the request to "Hurry up !" 
 most of the day. The examples we see urge it. 
 The things which can be done quickly, the 
 quick profit, the immediate reputation, the 
 pleasure that can be seized rather than waited 
 for — all these assume the largest proportions 
 and appear as the finest prizes. It is a sad 
 tyranny, for it obscures the truth that the 
 finest things in life are never won in a hurry. 
 It takes time to achieve a fine friendship, to 
 mold a character or to build up the materials 
 
124 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 of a lasting happiness. The best things in a 
 forest are not its mushrooms but its oaks, and 
 the best in the heart must grow. 
 
 The squeeze of the crowd flattens out indi- 
 viduality by its despotic demand for con- 
 formity. It instills a mean terror of singu- 
 larity. There is a kind of nervous affection 
 known to medicine as agoraphobia — the fear 
 of open places. The person afllicted with it 
 has an ineradicable aversion to standing alone, 
 away from people or the shelter of some build- 
 ing. What ravages the "fear of open places" 
 has wrought in life, where one's convictions 
 would lead him to cut across the accepted 
 customs of his associates! The right gives 
 place to the "popular." Professor John C. 
 van Dyke has described the degeneration of a 
 colorist in the field of art. He says that the 
 painter finds out that "toned-down, washed- 
 out, and faded colors are easier to harmonize 
 than fresher ones, and where he formerly 
 thought to win by affirmation, he makes his 
 color negative or neutral and strives that it 
 shall not offend." "Toned-down, washed-out, 
 and neutral colors" are sadly flapping from 
 the rigging of many a life once bravely decked 
 out with the positive hues of conviction. 
 
HIGH-HANDED TYRANNY 125 
 
 You have read the Declaration of Independ- 
 ence and are proud of it. Have you ever made 
 one of your own? Emerson says, "To every 
 young man or woman the world puts the same 
 question, Wilt thou become one of us?' and 
 the soul in each of them answers heartily, 
 ^No !' The world has no interest so deep as to 
 cherish that resistance." 
 
XXIV 
 
 A HAIR-TKIGGER CONSTITUTION 
 
 Probably no one has given a better descrip- 
 tion of the temperament we all know only too 
 well, and describe as a "hair-trigger constitu- 
 tion/' than Lord Macaulay. Writing of Lord 
 Glengarry, a Scotchman of the time of Dun- 
 dee's Rebellion, he says, "He was one of those 
 persons who think it dignified to imagine that 
 other people are always insulting them." We 
 call them "touchy," "thin-skinned," "sensi- 
 tive," sometimes with a skin so tender that it 
 responds to any allusion that can be construed 
 into a personal reflection, with all the im- 
 mediacy of an open blister. "Get the facts 
 first," says Mark Twain in "My First Lie," 
 "and then you can distort them as you please." 
 Most any fact can be distorted by the man with 
 a hair-trigger constitution into a grievous 
 personal thrust at himself. The root of the 
 malady is in a self-consciousness that never 
 sleeps. It is doomed, like a ghost, to continu- 
 ally walk, alive and alert. The family crest, 
 
 126 
 
HAIR-TRIGGER CONSTITUTION 127 
 
 appropriately hanging over many an office 
 desk might well be the old flag of the Green 
 Mountain Boys in the Revolution, with its 
 coiled serpent and the legend, "Don't tread on 
 me !" The most general observations are mar- 
 velously distilled into particular and personal 
 remarks. In a very different sense from that 
 applied by Shakespeare to the poet, they "give 
 to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.'' 
 Sometimes we apply the term "hair-trigger" 
 not only to a sensitive vanity, but also to a 
 general irritability which is ready to explode 
 at a moment's notice. A gentleman in Indiana 
 has compounded a substance called Mitchelite, 
 which is claimed to be the most powerful 
 explosive known. But it may be doubted 
 whether its tendency to ignite without overdue 
 persuasion may not be matched and over- 
 matched by many human parallels. Such a 
 nervous tension is not by any means the prod- 
 uct of modern times, but it has been vastly 
 augmented and specialized by the city's speed 
 and din. A good deal of the saltpeter in the 
 human constitution comes from the jangle and 
 jar of the crowd. "Do you count the sheep 
 jumping over a fence?" a man suffering from 
 insomnia was asked. "No," he answered. "I 
 
128 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 count the automobiles as they whiz by." The 
 reply puts the whole change of a generation 
 in a nutshell. All the myriad kinds and de- 
 grees of "whizzes" tend to the upbuilding of 
 the hair-trigger constitution. 
 
 Such a temperament wonderfully adds to 
 the minor earthquakes of life. Yet there is a 
 cardinal place in the scheme of things for the 
 "touchy" person. Touchiness may be made of 
 splendid use, not by being obliterated directly, 
 but by being focused at a new point. Jesus 
 was the "touchiest" person who ever lived. 
 There is a sensitiveness and an alertness which 
 is a divine grace, as well as that which is a 
 human fault, and each continually asks the 
 same question, "Who touched me?" Only one 
 with a "hair-trigger" personality would ever 
 have felt the mute appeal of the suffering 
 woman in the crowd who put forth her hand 
 to touch the hem of His garment. Jesus was 
 instantly alive to the smallest disturbance in 
 his environment. Such disturbance did not 
 touch his vanity, for he had none. It unerr- 
 ingly struck something deeper — his sympathy. 
 There was no more miraculous quality about 
 him than a sympathy which not only goes out 
 to the multitude, but so acutely alert and 
 
HAIR-TKIGGER CONSTITUTION 129 
 
 quick that it could pick out the one needy 
 woman from the crowd as deftly as the magnet 
 picks up the piece of steel from other matter. 
 We may well add to the common complaint of 
 the traditional portrait of Christ, that it 
 utterly misses his strength, this other lack, 
 that it necessarily fails to convey the alertness, 
 the qui vive^ which was always with him. 
 
 Such a "touchiness" as was Christ's, his 
 "tangibility" we might say, is always one of 
 the world's greatest needs. So easily, much 
 of our daily walk, so far as ability to imagine 
 need and quickness to respond to it are con- 
 cerned, becomes a sort of sleep-walking. The 
 "hair-trigger" quality of Christ's sympathy 
 comes partly from two qualities which can be 
 reproduced — alertness and dramatic power. 
 Like the vanity of the man who so easily finds 
 slights, the sympathy of Jesus was always on 
 "field duty," reaching out for the barest possi- 
 bility of its exercise. Lack of alertness sub- 
 tracts largely from the possible blessing be- 
 stowed by even the tenderest heart. It must 
 not only have something to give stored away 
 but the dispatch of a trigger to move it. 
 
 We fail often, too, through lack of exercise 
 of dramatic power. True sympathy calls for 
 
130 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 the art of making a swift and veracious pic- 
 ture of a person or situation. Whatever dra- 
 matic power one may have or develop will be 
 Inore largely and fruitfully utilized in the path 
 of Christian discipleship than in any other 
 sphere on earth. Sympathy, so far from being 
 a weak and mushy sentimentalism, is the most 
 intellectual operation a man may engage in. 
 It calls for seeing and understanding all the 
 elements in a situation and putting himself 
 lovingly in imagination in the midst of them. 
 The Christian who responds with heart and 
 brain to the varied and complex needs of 
 others has composed a library of dramas, as he 
 makes their situation live before him. 
 
 The negative virtue of the "hair trigger'^ 
 man is that he is abnormally awake. It may 
 be transformed into a rare instrument of 
 power by changing its focus. 
 
XXV 
 
 THE LATEST THINjG 
 
 When G. Lowes Dickinson made his first 
 visit to America he came to the conclusion that 
 the dominant national passion was for wealth. 
 On his second visit he revised that judgment 
 as being superficial and decided that the great 
 ambition was not so much for wealth as for 
 power. On his last visit, however, he con- 
 cluded that the ruling passion was neither for 
 wealth nor for power, but for acceleration. 
 There are moments when the simple process of 
 crossing the street leads us all to agree with 
 him. 
 
 There are also moments when our observa- 
 tion would lead us to set up alongside of ac- 
 celeration as an ideal which holds a wide and 
 growing sway, the passion for novelty, the 
 desire to be sure that one is doing, seeing, 
 wearing, or thinking — the Latest Thing. 
 
 John Galsworthy, in his book of bright and 
 sharp, but not bitter, satires. The Little Man, 
 has drawn an exquisite portrait of a woman 
 
 131 
 
132 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 whose life was a chase of the Latest Thing, 
 showing the mental vacuum which was always 
 regarded by her as "living her life to the full." 
 Nearly every line of his keen description sug- 
 gests traits which are easily recognizable as 
 old acquaintances. "To look at a thing," he 
 says of this Passionate Pilgrim of the New, 
 "without possessing it was intolerable, but to 
 keep it after she had got it was even more so. 
 She had flung open all the doors of life and 
 was so continuously going out and coming in, 
 that life had considerable difficulty in catching 
 a glimpse of her at all." She was "a mere 
 perpetual glancing from quick-sliding eyes, to 
 see the next move, to catch a new movement, 
 God bless it!" She swam "on the full deep 
 river of sensations, nibbling each other's 
 tails. To say that she had her favorite 
 books, plays, men, dogs, colors, was to do her 
 but momentary justice. A deeper equity 
 assigned her only one favorite, the Next, and 
 for the sake of that one favorite, no Catherine, 
 no Semiramis, no Messalina, could more 
 swiftly depose all the others. Life, she thought, 
 must be so dull for the poor creatures doing 
 one thing at a time and that for so long." 
 In one sentence of his description, Gals- 
 
THE LATEST THING 133 
 
 worthy touches the real destructiveness of the 
 enthronement of novelty as the ruling passion. 
 "Life was so full that the moment it stood 
 still, and was simply old life, it seemed to be 
 no life at all." There is one passage as full 
 of spiritual understanding as it is of delicious 
 satire: "Once in a new book she came across 
 a tale of a man who 4ived' in Persia, of all 
 heavenly places, frantically pursuing sensa- 
 tion. Entering, one day, the courtyard of his 
 house, he heard a sigh behind him, and looking 
 around, saw his own spirit, apparently in the 
 act of breathing its last. The little thing, dry 
 and white, was opening and shutting its mouth 
 for all the world like an oyster trying to 
 breathe. 'What is it?' he said. 'You don't 
 seem well.' And his spirit answered: 'It's all 
 right, it's all right. Don't distress yourself. 
 It's nothing. I've been crowded out, that's 
 all.' And with a wheeze, the little thing went 
 flat." "The moon," Galsworthy concludes, 
 "was as yet the only thing which had eluded 
 her avidity, that — and her own soul." 
 
 We see this quest at the top of the social 
 ladder in the American woman in Paris who 
 offers a prize of five thousand dollars to any 
 one who will invent a really new social 
 
134 FARES, PLEASE I 
 
 "stunt." We see it daily in the most ordinary 
 spheres. Owen Wister tells of a lady who 
 went into the Public Library in Philadelphia 
 and asked the librarian to recommend a book. 
 He gave her one, but she looked at the title 
 page in disgust. "Why, this is a year old," she 
 said. "Give me something new." So he 
 handed her one that had just been laid that 
 day by Robert W. Chambers. We see it in the 
 folks who follow the call of "off with the old 
 love, on with the new," and whose friendships, 
 in the words of Douglass Jerrold, "are so 
 warm, that they no sooner take them up than 
 they must lay them down again." Most sadly 
 do we see it in the numbers who rarely ever 
 follow through any helpful piece of service, 
 before they are lured away by some new will- 
 o'-the-wisp. 
 
 The cult of the Latest Thing makes super- 
 ficial people. The real satisfaction and value 
 of our experiences do not come in the door- 
 ways and porches, but in the living rooms ; in 
 the things we know well enough and have 
 worked at long and patiently enough to obtain 
 their real reward. That only final source of 
 happiness, character, never comes from a 
 sight-seeing tour, but from the settled proc- 
 
THE LATEST THING 135 
 
 esses of work and home. The hunt of the 
 Latest Thing yields only shells. Dr. Cabot 
 has cleverly parodized some lines from "The 
 Village Blacksmith" : 
 
 Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing, 
 
 So I my life conduct. 
 
 Each morning sees some task begun. 
 
 Each evening sees it chucked. 
 
 It makes irresponsible people. The work of 
 the world cannot be done by jumping-jacks, 
 and its working capital of hope and courage 
 and love has an old-fashioned way of being 
 little affected by whether a thing is novel or 
 not. "The first quality of a soldier," said 
 Thiers, "is constancy in enduring fatigue and 
 privation. Valor is only the second." The 
 warfare of the Kingdom depends on the same 
 first quality. 
 
 There are many roads to monotony , but the 
 surest and most direct is the quest of the 
 Latest Thing. Eeal novelty in life is always 
 an inner freshness and never an outward 
 change. The person whose faithfulness in 
 individual and social service yields him the 
 glory of seeing new growth in the personality 
 of others, lives always in a new world. No life 
 
136 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 on earth ever teemed with such startling 
 novelties as did that of Jesus. He saw the 
 travail of his soul and was satisfied. "I have 
 meat to eat that ye know not of." 
 
XXVI 
 
 OVER THE WALL 
 
 "By my God have I leaped over a wall." 
 
 In these words David at the zenith of his 
 career as king at Jerusalem recalls the athletic 
 buoyancy of his boyhood days on the Bethle- 
 hem hills. His heart returns in the fullness 
 of his years to the free life of the shepherd boy 
 with its 
 
 leaping from rock up to rock, 
 The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree, the cool 
 silver shock 
 Of a plunge in the pool's living water. 
 
 As his mind lovingly returns to that life of 
 the hills, it occurs to him that the old acro- 
 batic leap of his boyhood is a figure large 
 enough to express the divine romance of his 
 providential career. His has been a strange 
 history, successively surmounting walls that 
 rose up before him and overshadowed his spirit, 
 and he gratefully recognizes that it has been 
 by his God that he has leaped over them. If 
 
 137 
 
138 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 we will glance at three swiftly moving pictures 
 in the life of this king, we will find that the 
 words are not only large enough to give us 
 the secret of David's life, but may afford a 
 true transcript of any spiritual history. 
 
 The first is the dark picture of the man 
 hedged in by the walls of a great sin. The man 
 after God's own heart is overshadowed by the 
 black murder done at the dictates of passion. 
 We rarely see the real nature of sin so clearly 
 as in David, a man so responsive to spiritual 
 impressions, so full of the riches of heart's 
 affection, so strong, so much of a genius, so 
 steadily ascending in power and character! 
 What a dismal anticlimax his sin was ! 
 
 It would only have been in line with innu- 
 merable life tragedies if, in his remorse, he 
 had thought of himself as fallen like Lucifer, 
 never to rise again. That is so often the his- 
 tory, an aspiring upward path and then a drop 
 into a deep well. And they accept the fall. 
 How many spiritual histories could be told 
 in the couplet of George Macdonald — 
 
 There came a mist and a blinding rain, 
 And life was never the same again. 
 
 But David did not stay in the pit. By his 
 
OVER THE WALL 139 
 
 God lie leaped over the wall. Read that inter- 
 view with Nathan and its searching convic- 
 tion, "Thou art the man," and then that 
 marvelous prayer of penitence, "Against thee, 
 thee only, have I sinned." Quick as a flash — 
 the word is poor, for no flash ever went off so 
 quickly as the movement of God's heart to true 
 repentance — God answers, "I have forgiven 
 thee." 
 
 The great thing about the sin of David was 
 that it was a parenthesis. It was not a full 
 stop, and after the break in the story the 
 thread of grace is taken up again. David did 
 not leap over the wall of sin by merely saying, 
 "That was a bad mistake ; I must do better in 
 the future." We know how little that avails. 
 We cannot lift ourselves out of the pit by our 
 own boot-straps. We conquer sin, not by tak- 
 ing thought but by taking God, and are lifted 
 from the mire by the strong cords of a forgiv- 
 ing, redeeming love. 
 
 The second picture is a brighter one. It is 
 in the cave where his enemy, Saul, is sleeping 
 in David's power. Between them the towering 
 walls of antipathy, dislike, and fear have risen 
 up as barriers, and the swift thought of the 
 sword as an easy way to end it all rushes into 
 
140 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 David's mind. But he escapes by bringing 
 into their relation the thought of God. This 
 man Saul, this man that he does not like and 
 with good reason, is still the Lord's anointed, 
 still has claims on his consideration. 
 
 What a high and strong leap this overcom- 
 ing of the walls of resentment and prejudice 
 is, we all know. Racial, social, and personal 
 barriers to our sympathy rise up on every 
 hand. Samuel Johnson said a very typical 
 thing when he declared that "he could like 
 everybody except an American." We all have 
 our own Bills of Exceptions. It was Scotch- 
 men with Charles Lamb, whom he said he had 
 been trying to like all his life without any 
 success. We say we can work with any one 
 except this particular person or that "He 
 gets on our nerves." We do not often over- 
 come our imperfect sympathies by a reasoned 
 process. We leap over the wall of dislike and 
 exclusion only as David did, by getting a God's 
 eye view of the other man. It was only when 
 the early church learned with Paul to see in 
 the contemned Gentile and the barbarian 
 without the law the brothers for whom Christ 
 died that it was welded into that conquering 
 union which knew neither bond nor free, 
 
OVER THE WALL 141 
 
 Scythian nor Barbarian. No matter what 
 may be the extent of our estate or what man- 
 sions we may erect, we shall never succeed in 
 building anything but a little prison house 
 for our spirits unless we get the divine view 
 of human relationships. 
 
 The last picture is a sublime one. The little 
 child of David has died. But he refuses to 
 accept as final the dark walls of death. He 
 makest the magnificent leap of faith in immor- 
 tality. "He shall not come to me, but I shall 
 go to him." It is not the perfect faith as we 
 know it in the New Testament. David did not 
 have the ladder of Christ by which to make 
 the surer climb. But it is probably the fairest 
 foregleam of immortality to be found in the 
 Old Testament. 
 
 In the shadow of that same wall of death 
 we have all sat before; there we shall all sit 
 again. And no matter how far we have ad- 
 vanced in spiritual knowledge over the days 
 of Israel's kings, it is still a leap of faith by 
 which we get into the sunlight of hope and 
 comfort. It even seems a longer leap to some 
 to-day because of the many newly disclosed 
 ties, showing our physical relationship to the 
 other creatures. In the Museum of Natural 
 
142 • FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 History in New York city there is a striking 
 series of the skeletons of the primates, 
 arranged in the order of their ascent. At the 
 head of the list there is a skeleton of a man, 
 bearing a certain number, by its inclusion in 
 that collection seeming to tell us: "Here you 
 are. A little better than the other apes, a 
 little more intelligent, more long-lived and 
 adaptable. That is all.'' 
 
 All? No! Faith says, "I accept the hori- 
 zontal lines that show my physical affinities 
 to the other creatures of earth; but I see and 
 hold to the vertical line that runs upward, 
 binding me as a child to an infinite Father, in 
 whose heart I have an eternal worth." Faith 
 says with Paul, "O death, where is thy sting?" 
 It says with Euskin, "Why should we wear 
 black for the guests of God?" 
 
XXVII 
 
 CLOUDING THE ISSUE 
 
 In all the catalogue of political tricks there 
 is no form of cleverness which brings larger 
 returns than skill in "clouding the issue." 
 This art carries an argument by discussing 
 something distantly related to it and succeeds 
 in making the whole thing turn on a point 
 which has little or nothing to do with it. 
 Millions of unsophisticated citizens have voted 
 to have the city treasury looted by a gang of 
 thieves because the scheme was cleverly draped 
 with the national flag while the band played 
 "The Star-Spangled Banner." We may smile 
 at the Carolina mountaineer who came up to 
 the polling booth a few years ago to cast his 
 ballot for Jefferson Davis ; but it is not quite 
 so amusing to think that there are large num- 
 bers of people who vote the Republican or 
 Democratic ticket at strictly local elections 
 because of their admiration of Lincoln or their 
 reverence for the memory of the late Thomas 
 Jefferson. This is the high art of the liquor 
 
 143 
 
144 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 propagandist who seeks to cloud the question 
 of the moral and economic curse of the saloon 
 with the specious issue of "personal liberty." 
 
 Looked at in view of all of its consequences, 
 this guileless "innocence" of allowing the 
 judgment to be confused by things irrelevant, 
 is a deadly form of sin. The cleverness which 
 causes it is part of that strategy which makes 
 up the largest part of the destructive power of 
 all sin, its ingenuity of disguise. It is an 
 ingenuity which dates from Eden, and every- 
 thing new to be said about it was old centuries 
 ago. It is a question, however, whether the 
 old pitfall of the disguises and fictions of sin 
 does not merit a freshened attention because 
 of a sure growth of softening the asperities of 
 life in the language used in the social and 
 business world. 
 
 Whatever may be the reason, whether from 
 an advance in politeness or a more adroit 
 salesmanship, old-fashioned plain and harsh 
 words are giving place to more subdued 
 and inviting ones. What used to be called 
 "cast-off" clothing is advertised and sold as 
 "slightly used" — a much more mild and agree- 
 able term. Instead of the old term "boarders" 
 we see frequent advertisements which refer 
 
CLOUDING THE ISSUE 145 
 
 to "table guests.'' Who ever hears of a second- 
 hand typewriter now? It is always a "rebuilt 
 machine." The clerk in the department store 
 is instructed never to ask if the buyer wishes 
 something "cheaper." She deftly suggests 
 "something less expensive" — a much more 
 flattering way of saying the same thing. 
 When a man is sick we learn that he is "indis- 
 posed." The old-fashioned cabinet photograph 
 which etched our features with pitiless truth 
 has given place to the "art study" which 
 endows us all with the distinction of beauty. 
 
 That all this makes for pleasantness no one 
 can deny. But with the glossing over of hard 
 and plain names of things in the minor depart- 
 ments of life, there is the very real danger of 
 transferring the same pleasant process to its 
 major departments and ending up with toning 
 down the asperities of sin. There is danger 
 of a kind of moral "aphasia," which malady 
 consists in being unable to remember the right 
 names of things. And "that way lies mad- 
 ness." It is hard enough at the best. The 
 same thing which is "stubbornness" in another 
 is usually labeled "firmness" when it appears 
 in ourselves. The "stinginess" of some one 
 else is only "prudence" when we act the same 
 
146 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 way. And the same words which on the other 
 fellow's tongue show "cowardice," on our own 
 are an instance of a "wise caution." 
 
 The strategy of sin has won its battle when 
 it gets us to call it by another name. One of 
 the most perfect pictures of the strategy of sin 
 is the story in the book of Joshua, of the device 
 of the Gibeonites who wished to form, for their 
 own advantage, an alliance with Israel. Israel 
 had been forbidden to make alliances of any 
 kind, and the ambassadors of the Gibeonites 
 put forward three pleas to show why this 
 alliance with them could do no harm. These 
 three pleas voice in absolutely perfect form 
 the three main strokes of sin in clouding the 
 issue. They said: 
 
 1. "TFe are come from a far country/^ This 
 was the ingratiating start. "There can be no 
 evil consequences, for we live so far away." 
 So speaks the voice of every temptation from 
 that of Eve down to the one we met an hour 
 ago. The danger seems remote, chimerical. 
 Others might possibly be harmed but not us. 
 
 2. ^^We are come on account of Jehovah^ 
 your God/' Here is diplomacy of the highest 
 order. Temptation never suggests that we 
 part with our religion. It whispers that there 
 
CLOUDING THE ISSUE 147 
 
 is no real antagonism between our religion 
 and the course suggested. Unthinkable! It 
 will even help Jehovah ! There is hardly any 
 sin whose real character cannot be clouded 
 with a religious motive. When a fresh ship- 
 load of slaves from Africa was Unloaded at 
 Newport in colonial days the minister publicly 
 rendered fervent thanks to God for his provi- 
 dence in "bringing these benighted blacks 
 under the blessed influence of the gospel." He 
 probably deceived every one — ^including him- 
 self — except the Almighty. 
 
 3. "We are your servants/' Here was the 
 oily culmination. Temptation comes as oppor- 
 tunity. It is the chance of a lifetime for 
 knowledge, power, advancement, all of which, 
 of course, will be put to a fine use ! 
 
 The Israelites learned that all this golden 
 eloquence boiled down finally into one "short 
 and ugly word." They were lies. Sin is 
 always near in its results; it is atheistic; it 
 never serves but always rules. 
 
 "The approach to Constantinople reveals the 
 most beautiful city in the world. The glamour 
 and romance of the East become for the mo- 
 ment realities. But presently the onlooker 
 begins to lose the ensemble. The forms of the 
 
148 PARES, PLEASE! 
 
 buildings become grotesque; the streets grow 
 squalid and the people and dogs make up a 
 mean and hideous entanglement of life." A 
 fair picture of the refractions of sin. The 
 only sure method of correcting them is the 
 daring of Joshua's dealing with the unknown 
 angel, to demand, clear down to the end of 
 every serpentine coil of reasoning, "Art thou 
 for us or for our enemies?" 
 
XXVIII 
 THE FALLACY OF PREPARATION 
 
 In one of the earlier chapters of her auto- 
 biography, Twenty Years at Hull House, Miss 
 Jane Addams describes the mood of dissatis- 
 faction which came over her at the end of the 
 year of European study, following her college 
 course. It was the indefinite feeling of being 
 tired of spending such a long time in prepar- 
 ing for a work which was not as yet clearly 
 defined or indicated. She says that she felt 
 as though she had made the discovery of a 
 practical fallacy which was not mentioned in 
 the time-honored list in the books of logic — 
 the fallacy of preparation. By that expression 
 she denotes the danger of missing many of the 
 opportunities of life while engaged on the 
 praiseworthy business of preparing for them, 
 and especially missing that finest part of 
 preparation that comes only through active 
 service. 
 
 It is a noteworthy phrase — the fallacy of 
 
 149 
 
150 FAKES, PLEASE! 
 
 preparation. In these days of scientific effi- 
 ciency and specialization in business and pro- 
 fessions and social and religious work as well, 
 there is not much danger of the importance 
 of training being lost sight of. But there is 
 always danger of our making the lack of train- 
 ing or waiting for an ideal completeness of 
 preparation an excuse for failing to seize the 
 immediate opportunities of service which are 
 at hand, and which are very likely to prove 
 the best our lives will ever afford. 
 
 No career that comes to mind affords quite 
 so complete an instance of the working of this 
 fallacy as does that of General George B. Mc- 
 Clellan. The Army of the Potomac needed 
 first of all a drill-master and McClellan filled 
 that requirement to a supreme degree. Yet, 
 while appreciating that need, he swung to the 
 other extreme of waiting for that readiness 
 which in his mind would justify an engage- 
 ment, and the judgment of military history is 
 that some of the most strategic opportunities 
 of the war rushed by while he waited. General 
 Meade said of him, "He was always waiting to 
 get everything just as he wanted before he 
 would attack, and before he could get things 
 arranged just as he wanted them the enemy 
 
FALLACY OF PREPARATION 151 
 
 pounced on him and thwarted all his plans. 
 There is now no doubt that he allowed three 
 distinct occasions to take Richmond to slip 
 through his hand for want of nerve to run 
 what he considered risks." He could never rid 
 himself of the delusion that the enemy's force 
 was far greater than his own, and the actual 
 figures always proved him wrong. His con- 
 stant complaint in the Peninsular campaign 
 was his lack of men, when the records later 
 showed that against his one hundred thousand 
 men Lee had an army of only sixty-three thou- 
 sand. 
 
 Life can be wasted in drilling just as sadly 
 as in open profligacy. "We refuse sympathy 
 and intimacy with people," writes Emerson, 
 "as if we waited for some better sympathy and 
 intimacy to come. But whence and where? 
 To-morrow will be like to-day. Life wastes 
 itself while we are preparing to live." The 
 real truth of the matter, so easily lost sight of, 
 is that preparation and achievement can never 
 be wholly separated. Each is a part of the 
 other. 
 
 In the service of the Kingdom, holding one- 
 self aloof from its tasks while waiting for some 
 vague, ideal readiness has wrought incalcu- 
 
152 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 lable loss. We do well to wish to be workmen 
 needing not to be ashamed. It is well to refuse 
 to offer to the Master only the tattered rem- 
 nants of our time and attention. The old 
 question of David should never be forgotten: 
 "Shall I offer to the Lord that which cost me 
 nothing?" But it is just as important to 
 ponder the deep meaning of Jesus's injunction 
 to the hanger back: "Let the dead bury the 
 dead, but go thou and preach the kingdom of 
 God." We wait for time before we are ready 
 to do this or that, forgetting that time for any 
 unselfish service is never an accident, but 
 ahvays a creation. We wait for some other 
 place ^ under the superstition that we shall find 
 that ideal condition which shall justify our 
 efforts; whereas the one truth which several 
 moves bring home to the mind is not so much 
 that all places are alike, for that is not true, 
 but that to a large extent we carry our own 
 place with us, and that our own attitude and 
 disposition are the most determining parts of 
 our environment. We wait for the right mood^ 
 some sparkling hour of inspiration which shall 
 sweep us on, forgetting that the high moods 
 of victory and daring come only on the invi- 
 tation of toil. 
 
FALLACY OF PREPARATION 153 
 
 "Some day — but not to-day, 
 I mean to put these trifles all away, 
 And arm myself for manhood's nobler fray. 
 To throttle wrong and baflEle greed, 
 And pour my life out to my brother's need, 
 Some day — ^but«not to-day. 
 
 "It is so hard, just now! 
 Another time I shall have learned just how. 
 Deliberation will my speech endow 
 With that one warm, persuasive word." 
 Ah! Hesitator, have you never heard. 
 There is no time but now? 
 
XXIX 
 
 THE CREATIVE INFLUENCES OF THE 
 CHURCH 
 
 There is a world of difference between the 
 manifestations of any movement and its crea- 
 tive influences. This would seem to be so 
 obvious a truth as to make its frequent restate- 
 ment superfluous were it not for the universal 
 fact that the one is easily mistaken for the 
 other. The person who is accurately described 
 as a classicist or traditionalist is one who 
 makes this mistaken identification and be- 
 comes so attentive to the local manifestations 
 of a movement that he removes himself from 
 the influences which have created it. 
 
 That was the mistake of the Pharisees, 
 whose case Jesus summed up in the sentence, 
 "You make void the law through your tradi- 
 tion.'' There are no ironies of history more 
 striking than those of the followers of great 
 movements who, through a mistaken loyalty 
 to some of its temporary forms, make it stand 
 for the very things against which it was 
 originally launched in protest. We see it in 
 
 154 
 
CKEATIVE INFLUENCES 155 
 
 the case of great political parties, which began 
 as associations of high-spirited innovators, 
 becoming the bulwark of the selfish and reac- 
 tionary interests of the political world. In 
 another sphere we see it in some who would 
 gladly transform, and through a sense of 
 loyalty too, so radical a movement as Meth- 
 odism, which began as an uncompromising 
 protest in the interest of spiritual freedom, a 
 daring venturing forth into new fields, into a 
 lifeless code of ironclad rules and unvarying 
 customs. 
 
 A few years ago there was a gigantic explo- 
 sion of dynamite on the New Jersey side of 
 New York bay. It shattered thousands of 
 windows in Manhattan and even broke dishes 
 in Brooklyn, fifteen miles away. All the fire 
 engines in the lower part of New York came 
 out and raced helplessly up and down the 
 streets looking for the cause of the damage. 
 They found plenty of manifestations of the 
 explosion, but did not discover the cause, for 
 that was miles out of their reach. 
 
 The creative influences of the church as 
 opposed to the resultant forms of that influ- 
 ence are equally far to seek. Gibbon, in the 
 classic chapter in which he attempts to explain 
 
156 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 the reasons for the success of Christianity, its 
 organization, zeal, charity, etc., only puts his 
 hand on results which themselves require to 
 be accounted for. He never enters the realm 
 of final causes at all. 
 
 In a real sense the final creative influences 
 of the church will never be comprehended by 
 the human mind. "Behold, I show you a mys- 
 tery." They lie buried in the unsearchable 
 riches of Christ, the central mystery of the 
 universe, that God is love. We never find the 
 final source of any great river such as the 
 Amazon or the Mississippi till we look for 
 it in the clouds. But at the head of every 
 river there are certain earthly beginnings in 
 the form of small eternal springs, from which 
 the little stream trickles out to find its glori- 
 ous destiny. So, as one explores about that 
 great seed plot of modern history, the book of 
 Acts, he discovers definite forces which were 
 the creators of the church and under whose 
 living influence the disciple must ever keep 
 himself. 
 
 A life through Christ is the real genius of 
 the church, for which no knowledge, no 
 tongues, no gifts, no achievements can ever be 
 substituted. The Christian Church was first 
 
CREATIVE INFLUENCES 157 
 
 of all a fellowship of experience. "That which 
 we have heard, which we have seen with our 
 eyes, which we have looked upon, declare we 
 unto you, that ye also may have fellowship 
 with us, and truly our fellowship is with the 
 Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ." Here 
 is the force that created — "It is no longer I 
 that live, but Christ liveth in me." All the 
 manifestations of the church, if not animated 
 by that life-giving force, no matter what 
 sacredness usage may throw around them, are 
 sterile. There is a pathetic little letter writ- 
 ten by Helen Keller to Phillips Brooks, when 
 she was about twelve years old. "Tell me," 
 she says, "something that you know about 
 God." "Something you know about God" — 
 the little blind girl spoke for the whole round 
 world. As the same request was voiced from 
 the mission field : "We do not want your adjec- 
 tival Christianity; give us the substantive 
 thing." All else that the church can give, 
 lacking its personal experience, is sounding 
 brass and tinkling cymbal. Generalization is 
 risky, but it does not mean much risk to say 
 that the periods in which the church has 
 moved with conquering tread have been 
 those in which this truth of the active presence 
 
158 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 of God in the soul have been emphasized ; and 
 the epochs when it has languished have been 
 those in which this truth has been obscured. 
 
 A brotherhood in Christ, The book of Acts 
 is flooded with the golden glow^ of the dawning 
 of a real democracy and brotherhood in Christ. 
 Out of the scattered and repellent fragments, 
 one living body of Christ was created. It is 
 easy to accept the brotherhood of man as a 
 dead or blunt truth, but it never becomes a 
 creative force until we make earnest with its 
 reality. It always means sacrifice. Its keen 
 edge which the world feels is well shown in 
 a letter which the Duchess of Buckingham 
 wrote to Lady Huntingdon, regarding White- 
 field and Wesley: "Their doctrines are most 
 repulsive and strongly tinctured with imperti- 
 nence and disrespect to their superiors. It is 
 monstrous to be told that you have a heart as 
 sinful as the common wretches that crawl the 
 earth. This is highly insulting and I wonder 
 that your Ladyship should relish any senti- 
 ments so much at variance with high rank and 
 good breeding." In the Evangelical Revival 
 of the eighteenth century England was re- 
 created by the Christian democracy of the first 
 century. 
 
CREATIVE INFLUENCES 159 
 
 An urgency for Christ. "When he had seen 
 the vision, immediately he endeavored to go." 
 Through whatever changing forms it mani- 
 fests itself, that urgency of Paul is always the 
 soul of a real church. Samuel Johnson paid 
 a high, though unintended compliment to John 
 Wesley: "His conversation is good, but he is 
 never at leisure. He always has to go at a 
 certain hour. This is very disagreeable to a 
 man who loves to fold his legs and have his 
 talk out as I do." John Wesley's legs were 
 "unfolded" most of his ninety years. He had 
 felt his Master's passion for souls and, like 
 him, had not where to lay his head. When 
 Captain Gracie, one of the survivors of the 
 Titanic, died a year after the disaster, his 
 last words were, "We must get them all into 
 the lifeboats." That awful hour of the im- 
 manence of danger had stamped itself on 
 his mind, never to be forgotten. The same 
 degree of the vivid sense of the destructiveness 
 of sin and the urgency of the good news of 
 salvation lay at the heart of the first heralds 
 of the cross. 
 
XXX 
 
 WHICH KINGDOM? 
 
 There are some stories, familiar to the 
 world for years, which yet retain the dew of 
 their youth. One of these is the classic con- 
 cerning the visit of the father of the present 
 German emperor to a little country school- 
 house. Conducting an impromptu examina- 
 tion, he asked a little girl to what kingdom a 
 potato belonged and received the right answer 
 — to the vegetable kingdom. In the same way 
 he was told that a rock belonged to the min- 
 eral kingdom. Then, pointing to himself and 
 asking the same question, he was delighted 
 with the unexpected response that he belonged 
 to the kingdom of God. 
 
 ,The answer was more correct than the 
 "correct'^ one would have been. We do not 
 grudge the repetition of the old story, for it 
 is one of those flashes of spiritual understand- 
 ing sometimes ordained from the mouths of 
 babes. But it deserves far more than the ready 
 and unthinking assent which we usually give 
 
 160 
 
WHICH KINGDOM? 161 
 
 to it. It is always a pertinent question. After 
 all, what kingdom do we belong to? The an- 
 swer is not so obvious as it might seem. 
 
 When we look at the question in a fresh 
 way, that goes down to the very bottom of 
 the heart, we realize that we all know people 
 who seem to have more real affinities to the 
 vegetable kingdom than to any other. They 
 live ; they grow ; they take from their environ- 
 ment things necessary for their sustenance; 
 all the things which a fine garden vegetable 
 does — and not a very great deal more. A few 
 years ago one of the great capitalists of 
 America died, a man known to the public 
 mainly by three facts: he was worth more 
 than fifty million dollars, he had never taken 
 a vacation, and he lunched every day on an 
 apple. One of the New York dailies, com- 
 menting on his career, said that he had prob- 
 ably gotten as much enjoyment out of life as 
 a healthy vegetable. Which comment, while 
 flavored with witty exaggeration, was headed 
 in the direction of truth. Queen Elizabeth 
 once asked the secretary of the House of Com- 
 mons what passed during the session. He 
 answered, wearily, "Seven weeks." To spend 
 life merely in passing the time, however pleas- 
 
162 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 antly, is truly called "vegetating/' Such life 
 has no returns from ventures of thought or 
 investments of action. It goes "from thought- 
 less youth to ruminating age." Somewhere 
 along in its latter half it always meets that 
 very real tragedy which occurs when life takes 
 on a dwindling aspect. Sydney Smith put 
 it gTimly when he said of a friend, "He spent 
 all his life letting down empty buckets into 
 empty wells, and now he is frittering away 
 his age trying to draw them up again." 
 
 The brightest silver lining to the clouds of 
 sorrow is the truth that God uses pain and 
 misfortune to awaken us to a higher kingdom. 
 Sorrow is usually his call, "Friend, come up 
 higher." "I learn day by day," wrote Steven- 
 son, on a sick bed, "the value and high doc- 
 trinality of suffering. Let me suffer always; 
 not more than I can bear, for that drives men 
 mad ; but still to suffer some, and never to sink 
 to the eyes in comfort and respectability." 
 How many life histories are summed up in 
 these words of Harriet Martineau: "But for 
 the loss of our father's money, we might have 
 lived on in the ordinary provincial method of 
 ladies with small means, growing narrower 
 every year; whereas, by being thrown on our 
 
WHICH KINGDOM? 163 
 
 resources while it was yet time, we have 
 worked hard and usefully, won friends and 
 independence, seen the world abundantly 
 abroad and at home, in short, have truly lived 
 instead of vegetating.'' 
 
 Sometimes again men become so hard by the 
 scramble of competition, so capable of resist- 
 ing impression made by anything less soft and 
 metallic than a coin, that they seem almost to 
 belong to the mineral kingdom. They have the 
 undeniable power of making their way that a 
 bullet has and the same unyielding quality. 
 It is a good thing on occasion to stand like a 
 rock ; it is a sad thing to become one. 
 
 We all belong to the animal kingdom^ and 
 it is not only a worthy ambition but a God- 
 given duty to become the best animal of which 
 we are capable. But it is a poor stopping 
 point. On leaving a famous health resort in 
 Germany a grateful patient wrote in the guest 
 book. 
 
 Content return I from this blessed wood. 
 
 I found here health, life's highest, truest, good. 
 
 But a wiser man wrote beneath the lines : 
 
 That is not life's best good. That is but half. 
 Else were most blest a healthy little calf. 
 
164 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 Once when Tennyson was looking at a portrait 
 of a retired politician in his bland family 
 aspect he made the observation, "He looks like 
 a retired panther." There are some politicians 
 to whom such assignment to the animal king- 
 dom would have had more truth than simile. 
 
 In the kingdom of God every man, emperor 
 and peasant, millionaire and clerk, belongs. 
 "God is a Spirit, and those who worship him 
 must worship in spirit and in truth," has its 
 corollary in the truth that man is a spirit, and 
 only in the fellowship of his Father's life and 
 purpose does he find his true sphere. 
 
 For what are men better than sheep or goats 
 That nourish a blind life within the brain. 
 If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer 
 Both for themselves and those who call them friend? 
 For so the whole round earth is every way 
 Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. 
 
 The world of nature knows two kinds of forces 
 — the gravitant forces, such as gravitation, 
 and the radiant forces, such as electricity and 
 radium. The man who belongs to the kingdom 
 of God holds the gravitant forces of his life, 
 its acquisitive and accumulative powers, under 
 the domination of the radiant forces of love 
 and service. 
 
XXXI 
 
 "A MAXIM SILENCER FOR OLD 
 WHEEZES'' 
 
 "A Maxim Silencer for Old Wheezes" is 
 the sparkling title of a recent article in the 
 Atlantic Monthly. In it Mr. Seymour Deming 
 gives us a list of soft and silencing answers 
 with which to drown the endless and tiresome 
 repetition of old worn out saws, particularly 
 those that have to do with the economic and 
 social questions. It would be a fine thing if 
 we could have a similarly effective means pre- 
 sented for killing off the crystallized lies 
 which masquerade as gems of thought in the 
 moral and religious world. We are told in 
 the New Testament to "try the prophets" be- 
 fore following them ; and in this modern world 
 it is just as well to "try" the epigrams as well. 
 For the power for evil which is carried by a 
 crisp looking popular epigram is unreckon- 
 able. By dint of endless repetition they get 
 themselves believed among those who never 
 challenge them, and by implying far more 
 
166 FAEES, PLEASE! 
 
 than they assert they act as paralysis on 
 action. 
 
 Hardly a day passes on which we are not 
 informed that ^Ht takes all kinds of people to 
 make a worldJ' The trite saying is usually let 
 drop with an air of having made a fresh contri- 
 bution to the world's wisdom. This choice 
 remark was given a high place in Gelett Bur- 
 gess's celebrated list of "bromides" and with 
 reason. Hardly any other piece of conversa- 
 tional small change is circulated with more 
 frequency by the mentally indolent. It con- 
 tains this much truth — that there are all kinds 
 of people in the world, and, more than that, 
 it takes different kinds of people to make an 
 interesting world. But the "epigram" raises 
 a mental fog which obscures moral distinc- 
 tions. It apologizes for delinquencies as 
 though honest men and thieves were as inevita- 
 ble classes of men as short men and tall. This 
 fog of shallow thinking is shown in the great 
 popularity of this flabby quatrain, so often 
 used as a wall motto : 
 
 There's so much bad in the best of us. 
 And so much good in the worst of us. 
 That it doesn't become any of us 
 To talk about the rest of us. 
 
"A MAXIM SILENCER" 167 
 
 With the evil of gossiping we can all hasten 
 to heartily agree. But the logical effect of the 
 whole is to question seriously the value of 
 moral effort and ends in the creeping paralysis 
 of "What's the use?" The truth is, of course, 
 that it takes only one kind of people to make 
 the right kind of a world — the people whose 
 lives under all varieties of temperament and 
 circumstances are forces in establishing the 
 kingdom of God. 
 
 If this lie has slain its thousands, its first 
 cousin, ^^Ifs not what you believe hut what 
 you do that counts/^ has slain its ten thou- 
 sands. For through the medium of the post- 
 card, the anaemic poetry of the daily press, 
 and the thoughtless turning of human phono- 
 graphs, this sentiment of the uselessness of 
 belief has grown quite imposing and substan- 
 tial. It has this coating of truth, of course, 
 that an effectual belief always fulfills itself in 
 deeds. But in the sense in which it is most 
 widely quoted it contains as much wisdom as 
 to say, "It doesn't make any difference what 
 a farmer plants, it's what he grows that 
 counts." This philosophy speaks daily to 
 thousands in the following sweet and sickly 
 lines : 
 
168 FAEES, PJLEASE! 
 
 So many paths, so many creeds, 
 So many words that wind and wind; 
 
 When all the poor old world needs 
 Is just the art of being kind. 
 
 How simple ! The verse would lead us to sup- 
 pose that the art of being kind werie the most 
 trifling matter in the world. There could not 
 be a greater fallacy. The art of being persist- 
 ently and intelligently kind is the most tre- 
 mendous task to which the race ever set itself. 
 We would stamp as an idiot the man who 
 would muse, "So many clouds, so many rains, 
 so many useless things in earth and sky, when 
 all the world needs is more corn and wheat." 
 To grow a stalk of wheat calls for the cosmic 
 energies of the universe. And a life of effec- 
 tive kindness, in the same way, demands an 
 endurance of will and loftiness of motive 
 which will not grow in the top soil of senti- 
 mentalism but require a real and rational faith 
 in God. 
 
 Another old saw which carries the terrify- 
 ing club of an axiom is that valiant retainer 
 of the liquor traffic and every interest that 
 preys on men, ^^You can't change human 
 nature/' Many folks, who would scorn to 
 allow themselves to be browbeaten by a human 
 
"A MAXIM SILENCER'^ 169 
 
 bully with a club, will meekly surrender when 
 this blustering bit of nonsense appears. It is 
 nonsense because it begs the whole question 
 by assuming that human nature is a rigid, 
 static thing in which the ignorance, the vices, 
 and follies of men were ineradicably set. 
 Human nature is a dynamic, living, gi'owing 
 thing, and "it doth not yet appear what we 
 shall be." We cannot change an acorn, but 
 we can mercilessly destroy conditions which 
 forbid its development into the mighty, normal 
 oak. Which is just what every effort for the 
 betterment of humanity aims to do. 
 
 Saint Paul gave the advice in the first cen- 
 tury, to "shun old wives' fables." If he were 
 here to-day, he would surely let it stand. 
 
XXXII 
 PILGRIM'S PROGRESS— REVISED 
 
 Among the curiosities of literature is Ben- 
 jamin Franklin's revision of the Lord's 
 Prayer. The same ignominious fate which was 
 met by Franklin's attempt at improvement 
 awaits anyone who would have the imperti- 
 nence to lay a revising hand on Pilgrim's Prog- 
 ress. The book's timeless place is secured, if 
 on no other score, by the approval of a timeless 
 childhood. It has been a spring, never dry or 
 intermitent, both of good diction and good 
 deeds. 
 
 Accordingly, we have not the rashness of 
 offering any revision of our own time. We 
 venture only to suggest a revision which pre- 
 ceded the original work by some centuries, as 
 a sort of preliminary footnote. 
 
 The one defect of Bunyan's immortal record 
 for our day is its lack of social outlook. The 
 story of one lone man battling his way from 
 the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, 
 however heroic it may be, is always a frag- 
 
 170 
 
PILGRIM^S PEOGRESS 171 
 
 ment. If Ms solitary victory is all that is 
 achieved, we may well ask, from the point of 
 view of future pilgrims, 
 
 "But what good came of it at last?" 
 
 Quoth little Peterkin. 
 "Why, that I cannot tell," said he; 
 "But 'twas a famous victory." 
 
 After Pilgrim comes his wife, in the less 
 known sequel, along the same way, to find not 
 a stone rolled aside, bridge built, or forest 
 cleared. It is a better Pilgrim's Progress 
 which is suggested in the book of Proverbs, 
 "The path of the righteous is made a high- 
 way.'' The ideal of a man who not only gets 
 there himself, but who, as he goes, builds a 
 road, levels a hill, is infinitely larger. Such 
 an ideal brings to the detached romance of the 
 adventurer the social service of the pioneer. 
 The figure comes from the thought that the 
 desert road on which the caravan moves with 
 safety and ease was once the lonely hazard of 
 one man over the uncharted waste. 
 
 Every broad highway on which we move 
 was once a foot path. Out in Penn Valley 
 Park, in Kansas City, beside the track of the 
 Santa Fe Railroad, is a monument which 
 marks the course of the old Santa Fe trail — 
 
172 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 a mute but eloquent commentary on this truth. 
 It is a tonic to the spirit to think of the great 
 steel highway, along which international traffic 
 plunges at the rate of fifty miles an hour, being 
 once the daring and solitary wheel print of a 
 "prairie schooner." It is true of the highway 
 of the spirit as well. It is hard for us to im- 
 agine the time when liberty of conscience and 
 speech was a new and daring heresy. 
 
 If every road was once a path, the converse 
 is equally true, that every path becomes a 
 road, and therein lies the inspiration for to- 
 day's pilgrim. Glance swiftly at some of the 
 stations passed by Bunyan's wayfarer, and 
 notice how their bleak outlines blossom as the 
 rose to the real life pilgrim who builds as he 
 goes. 
 
 Hill Difficulty is on every path. The mag- 
 netism which there is in the mere hope of 
 getting to the top is often too weak to urge 
 on a heart that is heavier than lead. But add 
 the prospect of laying a pavement, of driving 
 a stake for the next man to pull up by, and it 
 is a new road. It is just as hard, perhaps, but 
 a lot more worth while. Christ began with 
 the hill path. That new and living way by 
 which we easily go to the heart of God was 
 
PILGRIM'S PROGRESS 173 
 
 first laid out by forty days of hard journeying 
 in the wilderness of temptation. He made a 
 Pilgrim's Progress for the hope which was set 
 before him. He was strong to save because he 
 was strong to suffer. It is always true. By 
 the development of our own strength to serve, 
 by our addition to the world's stock of hill- 
 reducing examples, we lay paving stones on 
 every hill we ascend. 
 
 Doubting Castle is less of a grim dungeon 
 viewed in this light. Phillips Brooks says 
 that very few men have helped others by a 
 direct solving of their doubts, but that an 
 innumerable company have made a way out of 
 doubt for others by showing them the spectacle 
 of one holding true his course of life when it 
 was known that all doubts were not at rest. 
 Tennyson was overwhelmed on his eightieth 
 birthday by the expressions of love that came 
 in from all parts of the world. "I do not know 
 what I have done," he said, "that so many 
 people should feel grateful to me except that 
 I have always kept my faith in immortality." 
 What an "all" it was! The stanzas of "In 
 Memoriam" loom up like the girders of a 
 great bridge from doubt to faith which has 
 furnished sure footing for thousands. 
 
174 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 Even the Slough of Despond grows its 
 flowers. The noblest tribute ever paid to Pitt, 
 finer than any that Macaulay or Leeky ever 
 penned, was the remark of an infantry cap- 
 tain. "No one," he said, "ever went into his 
 closet without coming out a braver man." The 
 spectacle of Pitt making his way through 
 Herculean tasks helped the soldier to face his 
 own. Out of his own hard path Pitt made a 
 common highway for the spirit of the nation. 
 
 Pioneer days in our national development 
 exist only in books and memory. But in the 
 religious and moral life road-building days 
 never pass away. Wherever men and women 
 are bravely meeting their own difficulties and 
 conquering them we can hear the crash of the 
 ax of the pioneer. 
 
XXXIII 
 WASHING THE AIR 
 
 In nearly every large city hospital there will 
 be found a device for the startling but useful 
 purpose of "washing the air." It is a jarlike 
 receptacle which may be attached to any win- 
 dow, and through which the air is forced 
 through water for purification, and set in mo- 
 tion by a fan. It catches the outdoor breezes, 
 gives them a thorough shampoo, and dispenses 
 them for needy nostrils. Even when the hos- 
 pital is environed with a forest of smoke 
 stacks, the air can be "washed'^ for safe and 
 healing use. 
 
 The modest little jar at the hospital window 
 is a graphic picture of the function of prayer 
 in a life set against a grim and dusty back- 
 ground. There is no theater of an active, busy 
 life whose atmosphere does not hold in solu- 
 tion dust and dirt that lodges in the mind and 
 heart, obscuring vision and lowering vitality. 
 Aims, standards, and practices not our own 
 will lodge in the mind as surely as dust in the 
 
 175 
 
176 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 lungs, unless the air we move in is continually 
 charged with new life. The mediaeval solution 
 of this problem was to go where the air was 
 free from contagious dust, necessarily arising 
 from an evil world. The Christian solution is 
 not to flee from the air, but to wash it ; to pass 
 it through what has been finely called the great 
 alembic of God's will in prayer and to renew 
 it through the transformation of the mind as 
 a heart is lifted up into a new world and 
 new air. 
 
 It is also true that the largest part of our 
 service for others is the indirect one of clear- 
 ing the atmosphere, "washing the air'' in 
 which they live, furnishing a medium in which 
 their best may spontaneously spring up. The 
 direct and immediate benefits we are able to 
 give are largely confined to cases of excep- 
 tional intimacy, or a rare endowment of wis- 
 dom or means. We cannot assume direct 
 charge or responsibility of another and expect 
 to do much service by infallible advice or 
 repeated exhortation. Such an attitude re- 
 sembles too closely the one who would say, "I 
 am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips let no 
 dog bark!" We do most when our attitude 
 and temperament induce a response, as pure 
 
WASHING THE AIR 177 
 
 air, without alluding to its presence or pur- 
 pose, builds up tissue. 
 
 Attach your spiritual device for washing the 
 air to the window of a room which is full of 
 strife, and what a new current circles through ! 
 "A soft answer turneth away wrath." It 
 brings to the atmosphere an oxidation which 
 is death to the germ of strife. Lincoln had in 
 his large and generous personality such a 
 faculty, without which his best work would 
 have remained undone. "Do you know," asks 
 an irate partisan, bursting in on him, "that the 
 Secretary of War called you a blamed fool?" 
 "Well," comes the unruffled answer, "Stanton 
 is generally right." Such a spirit is like open- 
 ing a door in a close room and allowing a cool 
 breeze to sweep through. It enables a stifled 
 self-control and judgment to breathe anew. 
 
 For how truly great a genius is another role, 
 that of comforter in sorrow, cast ! Rarely does 
 the word sent out in direct treatment ever 
 come within sight of its mark. Our most sin- 
 cere word often "thrusts a bungling hand amid 
 the heartstrings of a friend." The offering of 
 the truest philosophy and citation of Scripture 
 leave the air still close. The error we often 
 make is to assume that we can by any effort 
 
178 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 heal the wound directly. God and his great 
 almoner Time alone can do that. But to be 
 present with a quiet and steady affection 
 which takes itself for granted is to pass the 
 heavy atmosphere weighing down on our 
 friend through the medium of a sympathetic 
 friendship, and so give it new life. 
 
 But the most frequent contribution which 
 we can make to the air which others breathe is 
 that which fills it with the oxygen of incentive. 
 How quickly one transported from the East 
 Side of New York responds to the pines of the 
 Adirondacks. The great danger which the 
 newcomer to Colorado runs is that he will 
 work himself beyond his strength in a few 
 weeks. There is an exhilaration in the air 
 which makes for work — a freshness and a zest, 
 from which all germs of "the sleeping sick- 
 ness" have been effectually sponged out. It 
 has the same effect which a high and resolute 
 attitude to life carries with it wherever it 
 appears. "Beauty and rhythm," says Plato, 
 in a noble apology for art, "find their way into 
 the secret places of the soul." So does every 
 kind of noble activity tend to create its repro- 
 duction, not as a mechanical replica but as a 
 native growth. 
 
WASHING THE AIR 179 
 
 In the first story published by the late O. 
 Henry there is a young shop girl who keeps 
 a picture of Lord Kitchener on her table, not 
 having the least idea who he was, because he 
 had a "stern face." It was stern enough, at 
 any rate, to tide her over, by implied disap- 
 proval, the temptation of the one night with 
 which the author's sobering story concerns 
 itself. It is not overdrawn. The fine and 
 noble face of Frederick W. Robertson has 
 hung over the desk of more than one man, 
 through the months and years, washing the air 
 clean of low aims and mean desires. 
 
 One thing about this device merits atten- 
 tion. It is a power plant. It calls for fuel, 
 energy, sacrifice. Purifying air concerns itself 
 Tvdth such concrete things as coal, steam, 
 dynamos. It is never passive. 'This indirect 
 method of service is not, therefore, easy. It 
 must be, not the sporadic effort of an hour 
 but the massed impression of a life. That 
 which sustains life comes from a life which 
 is itself a sustained effort. 
 
XXXIV 
 
 "AT YOUR PERIL!" 
 
 "We get our bread at the peril of our lives," 
 ran the testimony of the author of the book of 
 Lamentations, vividly picturing the uncertain- 
 ties of life in the conquered and desolate Jeru- 
 salem. We may well render thanks that the 
 lines are fallen to us in pleasant places where 
 we can win a livelihood without the risk of 
 life itself. Render thanks, that is, if in doing 
 so we do not forget that we have still a long 
 way to go in reducing the physical peril of 
 life. Kor need we go to Europe for examples. 
 There are too many thousand preventable acci- 
 dents in our own land that still make timely 
 the bitter cry of Thomas Hood, fifty years ago : 
 
 O God, that bread should be so dear 
 And flesh and blood so cheap! 
 
 A brilliant inventor has given this testimony : 
 "If I can produce a device to save time, I can 
 dispose of it in twenty places; but if I offer 
 an idea for saving life, I can hardly dispose 
 
 180 
 
"AT YOUR PERIL!" 181 
 
 of it at all.'' Time is money, but a man is 
 easily replaced. 
 
 Yet no matter how safe industry and travel 
 may become in the future years, the old word 
 of Lamentations will always be true of the 
 spiritual life. We will always get our bread 
 at the risk of having the process deaden our 
 spiritual aspiration and hunger. On the gates 
 at the entrance to every occupation and pro- 
 fession, there is written "At Your Peril !" To 
 say that is not to chant a wail over work. 
 Without labor the finest faculties of the soul 
 would sicken and droop. Yet, with all the 
 benefits which follow the concentrated pursuit 
 of an occupation, it holds perils as real as did 
 the forests where our ancestors hunted game 
 for food. 
 
 In the mere fact of routine, so large a part 
 of our daily toil, there lies the constant menace 
 to the mind and heart of life becoming an 
 uninspiring drag. Constantly thinking and 
 working in any groove holds the danger of 
 blunting the sensibilities to all that lies out- 
 side of that groove. "Tell me about Spain, 
 romantic Spain," asked a friend of an auto- 
 mobile tourist. "Well," he replied, "down in 
 the valleys the roads are pretty good, but up 
 
182 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 in the hill they are awful." Spain meant 
 nothing but roads to him. With his eyes glued 
 to the ruts, he missed entirely the face of the 
 fields and the face of man. "Born a man, died 
 a grocer,'' is often a true epitaph. Nor does 
 the mere kind of routine make very much 
 difference. Even so glorious a thing as preach- 
 ing may be allowed to become an unspiritual 
 drag. The tendency is to strike a level and 
 strike it so low as to leave out all high aspira- 
 tions and endeavors. 
 
 There is the lifelong peril of the means be- 
 coming the end. Like the dyer's hand the 
 mind becomes subdued to what it works in, 
 and the final purpose of life is forgotten in the 
 process of sustaining and furnishing it. The 
 number of things lost in a large city in the 
 course of a year is amazing. The London 
 police office handles over one hundred thou- 
 sand lost articles every year. But what a 
 much more appalling tale would be the story 
 of those finer lost things which are never re- 
 ported and often not even detected — ^ideals 
 slipped away, purposes pared down, and aims 
 beclouded ! When the means becomes the end 
 the world becomes a landscape without a sky. 
 
 Let him who thinks he has escaped in his 
 
"At YOUR PERIL!'' 183 
 
 money-getting the peril of covetousness and 
 avarice thank God ; then let him hasten to take 
 heed lest he fall. There is much food for 
 thought in the statement of a priest that he 
 had every conceivable fault confessed to him 
 except one — that of penury and stinginess. A 
 great artist has given on canvas his concep- 
 tion of avarice as having the forepart of the 
 body like a dragon and the rear part like a 
 shapeless iceberg. It is his portrayal of the 
 truth that the approach of avarice freezes 
 every fine enthusiasm and generous movement 
 of the heart. Other vices spoil different as- 
 pects of life ; this one chills it at the center. 
 
 Against these perils which do not appear 
 on Saint Paul's notable list — perils of the 
 counter, perils of the office, perils of the street 
 — there is only one remedy, a very hard and 
 heroic one: "Watch and pray." Thread your 
 routine with the nobler quest of the Kingdom, 
 supplement the contacts of the market place 
 with the companionship of the King, and you 
 will go unscathed by the Pestilence that 
 walketh at noonday. 
 
XXXV 
 
 EVERYTHING UPSIDE DOWN 
 
 In the aisle of a large department store the 
 week before Christmas, a lady who looked like 
 an animated Christmas tree, with packages 
 dangling from each arm, and a gentleman who 
 was looking the other way, were demonstrat- 
 ing to the complete satisfaction of the on- 
 lookers the incontestable theorem that two 
 bodies cannot occupy the same space at the 
 same time. There was a disastrous collision 
 and the packages flew in four directions. As 
 the man stooped to pick up the packages, the 
 woman gave relief to her feelings : "O, I hate 
 Christmas, anyhow! It turns everything up- 
 side down!" It was. on the tip of the man's 
 tongue to say, "Why, that is just what it is 
 made for," but there was a weather signal in 
 the look in her eye which told him that the 
 hour was not propitious for such philosophiz- 
 ing, so he lifted his hat and passed on. But he 
 always felt grateful to her for the deep though 
 unconscious wisdom of her remark. 
 
 184 
 
UPSIDE DOWN 185 
 
 There is far-reaching appropriateness in the 
 fact that the world's immortal baby story, 
 that of Bethlehem, should be a story of turn- 
 ing things upside down — for that is a baby's 
 chief business. It is a gross slander on babies 
 that their chief passion is food. It is re- 
 arrangement. Every orthodox baby rearranges 
 all that he sees, from the order of importance 
 in the family to the bric-a-brac and window 
 curtains. The advent of every baby completely 
 upsets his little world, both physically and 
 spiritually. And it is not one of the smallest 
 values of the fact that the Saviour of the 
 world came into it as a baby, that it reminds 
 men that every baby is born a savior, to some 
 extent, from selfishness and greed and sin in 
 the little circle which his advent blesses. 
 
 Christmas turns everything upside down. 
 This is the central truth of the incarnation — 
 "Immanuel, God with us." The upside of 
 heaven come down to earth. "The Word was 
 made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we be- 
 held his glory, . . . full of grace and truth." 
 Men miss the entire meaning of Jesus when 
 they see in him the highest upreach of man; 
 he is God reaching down and making common 
 cause with man's struggle. The meaning of 
 
186 FAEES, PLEASE! 
 
 Christmas puts down the mighty things in 
 men's minds from their seats — place, riches, 
 talents — and exalts the things of low degree — 
 humility, simplicity, and trust. Charles Lamb, 
 in one of his most delightful essays, sets high 
 worth on the observance of All Fools' Day, 
 because it says to a man: "You look wise. 
 Pray correct that error!" Christmas brings 
 the universal message to men: "You look im- 
 portant and great; pray correct that error." 
 It overturns the false standards that have 
 blinded the vision and sets up again in their 
 rightful magnitude those childlike qualities 
 by which we enter the Kingdom. 
 
 Christmas turns things inside out. Under 
 the spell of the Christmas story the locked up 
 treasures of kindliness and sympathy come 
 from the inside of the heart, where they are 
 often kept imprisoned, to the outside of actual 
 expression in deed and word. We read of the 
 visit of the Wise Men, that when they saw the 
 Child they unlocked the chest and took out 
 their gifts. It is the vision of the Christ-child 
 which enables all men to get at the best treas- 
 ures of their lives and offer them for use. 
 
 Christmas turns things last end foremost. 
 The people whom the world arranges last in 
 
UPSIDE DOWN 187 
 
 its procession — the weary, the poor, the 
 foolish, the lame, the halt, the blind — these are 
 the ones who come at the very head of the 
 column in the consideration of the Little Child 
 who leads. The last, the least, the lost — how 
 often those words were on Jesus's lips — the 
 three great objects of his passion! It is not 
 the world^s idea of correct form. Here is the 
 order of seating on an old New England 
 Church, as preserved in its records: "First, 
 dignity of descent; second, place of public 
 trust; third, pious disposition; fourth, estate; 
 last (and least no doubt!) peculiar service- 
 ableness of any kind." What a commentary 
 on the New Testament! And yet most of us 
 unconsciously arrange our acquaintances or 
 possible acquaintances in the order of what 
 advantage they may be to us. Jesus reverses 
 the whole scheme as a perversion and sets up 
 a new basis of classification. His question is 
 not, What can this man do for me? but What 
 can I do for him? The most important person 
 for us to know, he tells us both by word and 
 example, is the one who needs us most. "The 
 first shall be last and the last shall be first." 
 
XXXVI 
 
 GETTING ALL RUN DOWN 
 
 In the spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's 
 
 breast; 
 In the spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another 
 
 crest. 
 
 In the spring also the barns along the 
 country roadside begin to burgeon with large 
 and gaudily painted enticements to buy Jones' 
 Sarsaparilla or Smith's Elixir of Life for 
 "that run-down feeling." They are worded 
 so alluringly that if we had not noticed the 
 symptoms before, we are almost persuaded 
 when we finish that we are pretty much "run 
 down." 
 
 "Getting all run down" seems to be quite 
 popular, particularly among those classes 
 which can afford it. Nervous exhaustion in 
 all its various forms has appeared so often 
 that it has been deemed worthy of a name all 
 of its own — "Americanitis." It is usually a 
 partial product of that ubiquitous and iniqui- 
 tous trinity, hurry, worry, and jar. And for a 
 
 188 
 
GETTING ALL RUN DOWN 189 
 
 long time it had elevated the Spring Tonic 
 into the dignity and proportion of a national 
 movement. But as a nation we are fortunately 
 getting over the drug habit. The advertise- 
 ment is no longer our chief guide, philosopher, 
 and friend in matters of health. We have 
 listened to wiser advice and are learning that 
 to cure a disease calls for far different 
 remedies than merely to stifle its symptoms. 
 Not many ills are cured from bottles, and in 
 nervous exhaustion particularly, the final reli- 
 ance is on rest, food, and change. 
 
 Getting all run down is serious business and 
 frequently wins too little sympathy from those 
 who are entire strangers to overtaxed nerves. 
 In a large number of cases, however, and per- 
 haps to some extent in most, the physical ex- 
 haustion is only the easily noticed foreground, 
 of which the equally important background 
 which must be taken into account is spiritual 
 depletion. Where there is little or no reserve 
 of spiritual life and strength one is much more 
 liable to get run down in spirits and conse- 
 quently in physical stamina. The exertion 
 which a healthy man does not notice drains 
 heavily when the reserve fund is low. Many 
 a wise physician meets cases where the funda- 
 
190 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 mental need is not a few teaspoonfuls of any 
 prescription so much as it is a new grip on 
 life and a new outlook that will come only 
 through prayer and a new sense of God. Many 
 a physician not so wise keeps doctoring in the 
 dark for ills that have one real root at least in 
 spiritual bankruptcy. The process of getting 
 toned up often depends on the ability to re- 
 cover a conquering and confident mood, and a 
 lost mood is one of the hardest things on earth 
 to find. When Carlyle had lost, through the 
 carelessness of Mill's servant, his only manu- 
 script of the French Revolution, his wife tried 
 to comfort him by telling him he could write 
 it again. "I can get the facts again," he said, 
 ^^but how shall I recover the glorious mood in 
 which it was struck off at white heat?" 
 
 This recovery of a glorious mood is only 
 possible by bringing ourselves freshly under 
 the conditions which first caused it. And for 
 all cases of lost spirits the most important 
 element of restoration is the quickening at the 
 center of the sense and presence of God. "He 
 restoreth my soul." A contractor was asked 
 why a certain group of houses collapsed. He 
 replied that the workmen took the scaffolding 
 down before they put the wallpaper up. The 
 
GETTING ALL RUN DOWN 191 
 
 construction of some lives is equally thin. To 
 have a vigorous and real spiritual life at the 
 center is our greatest need for every point on 
 the circumference. 
 
 Another frequent cause of getting run down 
 in spirits is the fact that when our time is all 
 frittered away in unimportant pursuits it 
 easily begins to drag. Some one asked an 
 attendant at a large German sanitarium what 
 the guests did in rainy weather. "O," he an- 
 swered, "they just annoy themselves." It 
 describes very well the result of many fussy 
 activities even when the skies are clear. They 
 "annoy" themselves, and the annoyance, sus- 
 tained by no high motives and bringing no 
 bracing returns, wears on the nerves. It was 
 a vastly different answer which the keeper of 
 the lighthouse on Long Island gave to the 
 question as to whether he got lonesome. "Not 
 since I saved my man," he said with a gleam 
 in his eye. The joy which is real re-creation 
 is the joy of service, to which Miss Sullivan, 
 the teacher of Helen Keller, has given such 
 fine expression in one of her letters : "My heart 
 is singing for joy this morning. The light of 
 understanding has shown on my little pupiFs 
 mind and, behold, all things are new !" 
 
192 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 Every one who lives earnestly must expect 
 fatigue. We must use whatever means we can 
 to restore the wearing down — rest, fresh air, 
 and change. There is room even for the right 
 "spring tonic." But behind all these things 
 is something finer and surer. "Even the 
 youths shall faint and be weary, and the young 
 men shall utterly fail; but they that wait 
 upon the Lord shall renew their strength; 
 they shall mount up with wings as eagles ; they 
 shall run, and not be weary ; they shall walk, 
 and not faint." 
 
XXXVII 
 "SPLENDID FAILUEES'^ 
 
 Mr. Harry Graham has gone to a strange 
 and unfrequented field for material for a very 
 suggestive book which he calls Splendid 
 Failures. Under this title he groups a number 
 of men of great endowment and wonderful 
 promise who never achieved any results at 
 all commensurate with their talents or public 
 expectation. They plucked victory by the 
 sleeve, but were not able to hold her, and their 
 moments of success have been quite forgotten 
 because of their ultimate failure. While the 
 author does not add the role of moralist to 
 that of biographer, some of his studies are so 
 extremely instructive that he who runs may 
 read their teaching in the simple and un- 
 adorned recital. The stories of three men in 
 particular are thought-provoking to a degree, 
 and are well worthy of a place in our remem- 
 brance. 
 
 ^'The Cockney RaphaeV This is the title 
 given to Benjamin Robert Hay don, a name un- 
 known to modern ears, but who, on his advent 
 
 193 
 
194 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 in London in the early part of the nineteenth 
 century, was greeted as one of the greatest 
 painters of centuries. His first painting was 
 warmly welcomed by the Academy and sold 
 for one hundred guineas. In •rapid succession 
 he produced large historical paintings which 
 were acclaimed by Hazlitt, no incompetent 
 critic, as the finest works of art since the days 
 of Titian. Wordsworth said of his ^'Christ 
 Entering Jerusalem" that it was worth wait- 
 ing half a century to complete. When it was 
 exhibited the whole of Piccadilly was blocked 
 by the carriages of those who wished to see it. 
 Leigh Hunt said of one of his works that "it 
 was a bit of embodied lightning." Walter 
 Scott paid him a flattering tribute: "When 
 all the figures in the picture get up and walk 
 away I want the little girl in the foreground." 
 Haydon was the possessor of abundant and 
 undoubted talent and to it he added the virtues 
 of unslackening industry; several times he 
 nearly blinded himself with overwork. 
 
 Even in the world of art to-day the name of 
 Haydon means nothing. The crossed threads 
 of many misfortunes run through his career, 
 but his inclusion in a list of "splendid 
 failures" is due most of all to two causes of 
 
"SPLENDID FAILURES" 195 
 
 many a failure, splendid and otherwise — pride 
 and envy. The early and enthusiastic recog- 
 nition turned Haydon's pride, already great 
 enough, into assurance of colossal propor- 
 tions. "What Homer dared, I'll dare," he 
 cries. "Genius was sent into the world, not 
 to obey laws, but to give them." "Give me 
 the dome of Saint PauFs," he exclaimed when 
 told that his canvases were too large. To this 
 blinding pride was coupled the destructive 
 force of envy. In long series of bitter letters 
 he heaped satire and abuse on rivals and 
 critics, and lived to see the early popularity 
 turn into neglect and caricature and found 
 himself friendless and bankrupt. The fair 
 promise of early years was turned into a tragic 
 struggle with debt and disappointment, to 
 which suicide finally put an end. 
 
 "A Shooting Star.'' This was the charac- 
 terization given by Lord Rosebery to Charles 
 Townshend, who held at different times in the 
 latter half of the eighteenth century nearly 
 every post in the British Cabinet. He was 
 Pitt's only rival in the admiration of the 
 House of Commons and was confidently ex- 
 pected to leave as immortal a name in history 
 as Pitt's. Great indeed must have been the 
 
196 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 talents which could have won from Macaulay 
 the tribute, "the most versatile of mankind." 
 Hume admitted him "the cleverest fellow in 
 England." Burke said, "Never in this or in 
 any other century did there arise a man of 
 more pointed and polished wit, or, where his 
 passions were not concerned, of more refined, 
 exquisite, or penetrating judgment." 
 
 Why should it be necessary to explain at 
 length just who so marvelous a prodigy was? 
 Surely, here is equipment enough for one of the 
 "few, the immortal names that are not born to 
 die"! With Townshend it was nothing more 
 complex than an entire lack of fixed principle 
 which might bring to some lasting fruition 
 his prodigal endowment. His only principle 
 was the career open to talents. He would have 
 agreed with the maxim of Talleyrand that un- 
 selfish devotion to a principle or a party im- 
 periled a man's chances of success. Let the 
 immortality of Pitt and the nameless abscurity 
 of Townshend speak as to the truth of Talley- 
 rand's cynicism! Townshend was never ear- 
 nest, loyal to no one, and though he was hailed 
 as the "greatest man of his age," lacking com- 
 mon truth and common sincerity, he is remem- 
 bered only by a few historians as a man whose 
 
"SPLENDID FAILUKES" 197 
 
 disastrous policy helped to rend the British 
 empire, and an orator of whose power nothing 
 remains but the faint reflection of a rhetorical 
 blaze. 
 
 ^^Little Hartley/^ Hartley Coleridge, in- 
 herited much of the strange genius of his 
 father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was 
 dubbed "the Philosopher" by Lamb when he 
 was three years old. At nine he had written 
 several tragedies, and at twelve was an accom- 
 plished Greek scholar. At twenty he was 
 appointed a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. 
 Surely, here was a fine sunrise! Yet before 
 he could enter on his Fellowship those habits 
 of dissipation which made him so soon a splen- 
 did failure had set in, and all the rest of his 
 life was "bound in shallows and in miseries," 
 of a lack of self-control and mental concentra- 
 tion. He left some poetry, highly popular in 
 its day, among which are some of the finest 
 lyrics in the language — a faint gleam of what 
 might have been. He died at the age of forty- 
 seven, having been indulgently cared for by 
 Wordsworth for many years. His biography 
 might be well summed up in a single line of 
 his own : "And still I am a child, tho' I grow 
 old." 
 
198 FAKES, PLEASE! 
 
 Splendid Failures are not good company as 
 a steady thing. They are depressing. And yet 
 they do for us one thing which is well worth 
 having done at any price. They take away 
 from some very familiar words all sense of 
 the hackneyed and give them a startling and 
 fresh application: "Not by might nor by 
 power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord." 
 
XXXVIII 
 
 SWAN SONGS 
 
 In that finest assertion of immortality to 
 be found outside of the Scriptures, the death- 
 less Phsedo of Plato, Socrates speaks of the 
 tradition of the swan singing before it dies. 
 "For they, having sung all their lifelong, do 
 then sing more than ever that they are about 
 to go away to the God whose ministers they 
 are. Men slanderously affirm that they sing a 
 lament at the last. And I too, believing myself 
 to be the consecrated servant of the same God 
 and fellow-servant of the swans, would not go 
 out of life less merrily than they." 
 
 So the great pre-Christian saint refuses to 
 make his final song a lament but voices a 
 paean of affirmation. Following such a noble 
 tradition some of the great seers of the race 
 have left among their last utterances, their 
 swan songs, part of the world's most priceless 
 treasure. The records of these hours of 
 supreme insight well repay our study. 
 
 One of the most imperishable pictures in all 
 literature is that given us in Augustine's Con- 
 fessions, where he and his mother, Monica, 
 
 199 
 
200 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 just before her death, stand hand in hand, 
 gazing out over the blue of the Mediterranean 
 wondering just what the character of the 
 eternal life will be, upon which she is so soon 
 to enter. We cherish the picture because it 
 expresses so perfectly a universal hope, love, 
 and wonder. ^^With what body do they 
 come?'' The old question of Paul's day evei' 
 remains in human hearts. 
 
 Three of the most inspired singers of our 
 own times have left for us in their later songs 
 three different aspects of immortality which 
 appealed most strongly to them as the end 
 approached. In those three aspects of faith 
 we find three characteristics of eternal life 
 which make up the sum of all we need to know. 
 
 1. ^^To meet my Pilot face to face/^ This is 
 the legacy to the world left by Alfred Tenny- 
 son, a rational faith in a personal God, to 
 whom the human soul has an eternal value. He 
 has fought his doubts and those of his age for 
 more than half a century. He has done valiant 
 service for the faith. He is now at peace. 
 
 For tho' from out the bourne of Time and Space 
 
 The flood may bear me far, 
 I hope to meet my Pilot face to face 
 
 When I have crossed the Bar. 
 
SWAN SONGS 201 
 
 He explained the Pilot to his son Hallam as 
 "that Divine and Unseen who is always guid- 
 ing us.'' The Pilot to Tennyson was no vague 
 "stream of tendency which makes for right- 
 eousness''; no "Infinite and eternal energy 
 from which all things proceed." "Mind," he 
 enjoined his son a few days before his death, 
 "you put ^Crossing the Bar' at the end of all 
 editions of my poems." It was his communica- 
 tion to the world that eternal life meant facing 
 the living Pilot. 
 
 2. "0 thou soul -of my souV These are the 
 words of one who never turned his back but 
 marched breast forward, Robert Browning. 
 They were written in his last years when the 
 death of his wife was still, as it always re- 
 mained, an unhealed hurt. His militant faith 
 in immortality includes a personal God as 
 surely as that of Tennyson, but his fresh sor- 
 row leads him to think of death mainly as the 
 reunion of a deathless human love : 
 
 For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave. 
 
 The black moment's at end, 
 And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, 
 
 Shall dwindle, shall blend. 
 Shall change, shall become, first a peace out of pain, 
 
 Then a light, then thy breast, 
 O thou soul of my soul, I shall clasp thee again, 
 
 And with God be at rest 
 
202 FARES, PLEASE! 
 
 Had Robert Browning never written a word 
 of poetry, he would have left the world im- 
 measurably in his debt by imparting what was 
 almost a new saeredness to marriage. His 
 fine and pure chivalry lifted human love into 
 divinity. His faith in the eternal reunion of 
 souls knit together on earth, as expressed in 
 "Prospice," is a permanent part of the world's 
 hope. 
 
 3. ^^So the right word be said/^ This is the 
 voice of our own Whittier in one of his last 
 songs, voicing an aspect of immortality some- 
 times forgotten. He does not forget the earth 
 he is to leave, but takes his "freehold of 
 thanksgiving" in the faith that the strivings 
 of his life here will contribute to the onward 
 march of his brothers after he is gone. 
 
 others shall sing the song, 
 Others shall right the wrong, 
 Finish what I begin 
 And all I fail of win. 
 
 What matters, I or they 
 Mine or another's day. 
 So the right word be said 
 And life the sweeter made? 
 
 Immortality of influence on earth will not of 
 itself satisfy our eternal longing^ but it is a 
 
SWAN SONGS 203 
 
 vital part of the deepest hope of every true 
 soul. Being dead, to yet speak, and be a bless- 
 ing to to-morrow as well as to to-day is a 
 part of the power of an endless life. 
 
 How much better these assured aspects of 
 immortality than the idle speculations with 
 which the curious concern themselves, with 
 their pre- and post-millenniums, their fan- 
 tastic dates, their exact chartings of the 
 streets of the New Jerusalem ! For the glori- 
 ous faith expressed in these supreme hours 
 is among the things revealed which belong to 
 us and to our children forever. The assur- 
 ance of God, the permanence of personality, 
 the onward sweep of the Kingdom on earth — 
 these things do not minister to a restless curi- 
 osity ; they are the sure girding of great souls 
 in the thickest of the fight. 
 
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