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Continued from Page 1. heavy burdens in this life must be passed, and where the heaviest burdens are, there are the great prizes also. No man of beeble frame and shaking nerve could be president of the United States thirty days and live. Henry Ward Beecher, with his fine genius of illustration, once said that a great intellect in a feeble frame is like a cannon mounted on a rickety carriage—which collapses every time it fires a shot. But again I say and with thankfulness that the exaltation of the flesh is coming back. Health and strength and bigness are prized and striven for. Athletic sports are regaining something of the honor and dignity which the games of the palaestra had among the philosophers, orators, poets, warriors and statesmen of Greece. The college graduate is no longer expected to be cadaverous, and infirm on his feet—"the native hue of resolution suckled o'er with the pale cast of thought"-but alert, strong, clear-eyed, full-tched. And the women likewise—walkers, riders of bicycles, members of amphibians and heavier, and abler than the young women of twenty years ago. Right living physically is tremendously close to right living morally, and blessed is the young man and the young woman who finds out early that disease is perilously near to sin, and that the first lesson of life is to honor and cherish the body.
And then to find the work that nature intended us to do, this is next—to understand our own strength. Emerson says, "The crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness." If only some necromancy would be invoked over the head of every young man as he steps forth to strip for the race of life, to say to him authoritatively, "Here is your path, run in it." It is so pitiful to see men struggling against their own character and constitution for years; and when it comes to a life long conflict, the man against himself and everything that beckons to him, going to his tasks like a gallery slave scourged to his dungeon, then it is tragedy. For I hold with Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer that no man struggles perpetually and victoriously against his own character. What a lot of melancholy misfits the world holds, Preachers so full of praise, so void of divine fire, so vapid and earthy, that the heavenly message turns to dust and rubbish on their lips. Lawyers as little kin to the controversies, the refinements, the technicalities, the sublime drudgery of the severe and magnificent profession, as Shakespeare to Graddrig. Doctors born to handle the chisel and the saw instead of the lancet and the scalpel. Farmers whose trenchant brain and facile tongue mark them for the thunders of the forum. Tradesmen whose fertility of resource and keenness of analysis point direct to the wig and gown of the advocate. Men everywhere pitifully uncovering their weakness to the world, because they have chosen, or have been driven, to live by their weakness instead of by their strength, pouring out mere feeble and shallow rills when in them lie unsounded wells of strength. Dean Swift, cynical, but wondrous keen, says: "It is an uncontroverted truth, that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them." The assertion carries its proof—for where one's treasure is there will his heart be also; where love leads on labor will follow—and love and labor will let no man fail. I have seen teamsters in the Rocky Mountains as complaisant and profanity—as the orator victorious in debate, or the poet suddenly awakened to fame. And that is it. Be a Napoleon of teamsters, a prince of shoesmakers. The choice of one's vocation is a right as in violable as the choosing of one's husband or one's wife, and a right to be exercised as carefully. And it must not be abridged by any artificial environment, or by any false conceit of station, or—I say it reluctantly—by any wish of parent. If only a figure from the crowd beckon you plainly and say 'come with me' then count yourself blessed among men and go where you are bidden. Ah, but there be many who hur question after question into the abyss and no voice comes back. Nature does not often take her children by the hand and lead them forth, as with her Handels, Bachs and Beethovens, her Pascals and Newtons and Michael Angelos, her Benjamin Wests, her Faradays and Edisones. To these she spoke authoratively, passionately, imperiously; and while yet children they flung open the temple of music, science, painting, poetry, and entered in. Nor does she often thrust men forth relentlessly—Bruno, Huss, Paul, Socrates, 'from the day of their birth,' says Emerson 'taking a bee-line for the rack of the inquisitor.' But I think she speaks to us all in esome fashion. Our wishes, the French proverb says, 'are the presentments of our capacities'; and it is deepest true, and it holds deep encouragement In every man not wholly sodden
there lies. I think, some natural bent and aptitude that should be sought for as the miner digs for the mother vein. Oh, yes, some trick, some trifle light as air, a fluttering scrap of paper, a broken chord of music, has revealed many a man to himself and set him on his right way. "The history of man is a calendar of straws." The youth, David Hume, is appointed to champion the cause of infidelity in a petty debate and becomes the renowned and life-long foe of Christianity. The boy Nelson sails a mimic ship upon a mimic sea, and so is born the hero of the Nile and Trafalgar.
But these revelations, omens, phantasms, are not for many. For the most of us it is just this simple and vital rule, dare to do that which you can do best. Stand on your own feet. Follow your own head. My observation is that the costliest mistakes a man makes are those wherein he is persuaded out of following his own judgment." We are not in peril of overconfidence. We are far too humble, most of us. We believe the thoughts of others are so much larger and wiser than our own. We bow to a voice. We knuckle down to an assertion. We are subservient to a mere look and hearing of authority. □ "And let me pursue this thought a little out of its channel. No man may dodge a necessary controversy and keep his strength. No issues that must be fought out for weal or woe, wherein the interests of society or community are involved. God owes something to the fighters, and neither access nor reward of merit shall come to him who will not struggle with the one side or the other. When Rome was in the throes of the great conspiracy against Julius Caesar and men were allying themselves either with the conspirators or with the fries ad of Caesar, Cicero courted both parties. And when Cassius inquired of Casca if Cicero said anything when pressed by the mob to declare himself, "Ay," said Casca, "the spoke Greek." Most eloquent of men, most skilled of all his fellows in the language of Rome, when the crucial hour of his whole life came, the time of all times when he should have spoken the speech of the people, in which he should have spoken Cicero, trembled and spoke Greek.
An having chosen our work, even though not quite wisely, having put the hand to the plow, shall we turn back? No, not lightly, not without most formidable and compelling reason. Ten years of faithful labor, in almost any field, will yield returns that will go far to compensate for the woes of uncongeniality. But shall we ever turn turn back? Ob Gcd, yes, if it be a tragedy! Shall a man's life be made a hideous and revolting task, when somewhere lies work that would command his love and enthusiasm? Shall he grin 1 to the end in the dark when there is a place for him in the light? The world is a richer and a greater and a better world for the men who have turned back—turned back from law, from divinity, from medicine, from journalism, from blacksmitting, from cobbling—a richer and greater and better world because men have not been disobedient to the heavenly vision, because they have taken another and a longer and surer look at the stars and have at last read their destiny aright.
And so let us say that the young man is sound in body, and that he is fitted to his place. And now let him learn the immense delight and the inexorable necessity of labor. What a miserable atom a man seems as he stands face to face with his life's problem in the aggregate. But put work into the atom and it will level the mountain—by pebbles, by spadefuls, by bod loads. I am amazed at the impossibilities that dissolve before the sovereign talent of labor. Young men, penniless from the shop or the farm, pushing their hard way through a college course to the bonors of their class; dull and stolid minds whetted and polished and quickened and strengthened to effective and commanding service; an uuleterted tinker working through pitiful and infinite toil to the creation of the world's great allegory; a blacksmith dictating to scholars and a stone mason revolutionizing the study of geology. But amusement deepens to reverence when I think of Copernicus and Kepler and Newton and Darwin and Tesla and Edison. For be not deceived. No tongue of fire hung over these men. No fire from heaven descended upon them. No revelation flashed across their vision. They dug their revelations out of the bowels of darkness. They were down on their knees, "burying their brows," says Browning, "burrowing and building broad on the roots of things." It was nineteen years of hard work from the fall of the apple to the announcement of the law of gravitation. Kepler's third law was the culmination of twenty-three years of unremitting toll, Edison drily says that success and achievement depend not half so much upon inspiration as upon perspiration.
Deputy Supreme Scribe, no Renowed High Prelate. No High and Mighty Past Keeper of the Seal, no Most Magnificent and Truly Consequential Grand Outside Watch, no goats, or buzzsaws, or merry-go-rounds, or 42nd degrees, or opening odes, or sick brothers or brothers in distress, or bob-tail flushes, or "full houses," or banquets, or swelled heads, or fantastic processes led by billy goats, and followed by—some of the most elegant gentlemen I have known. It is called the Ancient Order of Devoted Diggers. I do not know who bestowed this playful title upon it, but it will pay you to join. It is an "ancient order," indeed, this magnificent brotherhood of hard work. Sent into the world with the primal, eldest curse upon it, it has been the all-father of blessings. It has pierced mountains, subdued seas, uncovered knowledge, brought sciences and arts, planted civilizations. No wonder every language of progressive men has chrystalized into a prowler the illimitable power of labor. It is the key that locks all mysteries and demonstrates all possibilities. What is in your life? You do not know. Yonsea a little talent, a small facility, a certain acquirement; but your horizon shuts "own very closely." Call in work, the mit-de maker; set him to pushing, straining, digging, and then note how the flabby talent begins to gather strength, how the power of achievement greatens, how the walls of knowledge rise and grow and spread, how here, and here, and here, your small horizon lifts, and breaks and rolls back like a scroll. Let no man belittle the possibilities of his own life; for no man may measure the possibilities of labor. The rail splitter, with one year of schooling, rises to write classics for succeeding generations of his countrymen, and to live on always as the emancipator. What have the college man and woman more than their fellows who lack degrees? Vantage ground a little higher, that is all. Tools a little sharper, that is all. But the race is yet to be run; and it is not always to the swift. The temple is yet to be built; and it may be that the keen and polished tools will gather rust, and that the unfashionable kit of the plodder will raise the firm and loftier walls.
I have heard of a new organization under the sun. It has no Grand Mogul that I know of, no Serene Potentate, no Most Worshipful Right Reverend
And then work is the father of so many other conquering virtues. Your hard worker has courage. When he learns the lesson of labor, and where, there and then he learns also the lesson of courage. He goes with Browning's great thought:
"Then welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough.
Each sting that bids nor sits nor stand.
And he has cheerfulness and optimism. Keep tab on the things that worry you. Note what becomes of them, and observe what a startlingly large proportion of them dissolve into thin air. Modern philosophy will appreciate the keen point of the famous epigram of Epictetus, even if it can not wholly adopt its morality: "The door is open. If you wish to retire, go; if you stay, don't grumble!" And then he has learned patience, your worker. Lincoln is reported to have said to the war governor of Illinois, who was somewhat impatient of the slow progress of the war, "Be still, Dick, and see the salvation of the Lord!" Do thy work, brave heart, and then be still and see the salvation of the Lord. Honor the present hour, and some future hour will surely honor thee. "Nor sit, nor stand, but go," says Browning, seer of the century. Ah, blind! Infights. We do so use this hour, this day, just as a standing place, or a sitting place, from which to gaze and plan into the future. Yonder, and yonder, and yonder, we say, I shall do this and that. Fools and blind! "Write it on your heart," says Emerson, "that every day is the best day in the year. Every day is Doomsday." I have somewhere come across the pregnant thought that the days come to us like veiled figures, bearing rich gifts. But they say nothing, and if we fall to take the treasures, they silently carry them away. "Two men I honor," says Carlyle. "First the toil-worn craftsman that with earth made implement laboriously conquers the earth and makes her man's. Venerable to me is the hard hand,crooked, coarse, indefeadily royal. Venerable, too, the rugged face; for it is the face of a man living manlike. And second, him who is seen to tolling for the spiritually indispensable. We name him artist, inspired thinker, who with heaven made implements conquers Heaven for us!"
Well, this is the doctrine of work with a vengeance! Is there, then, to be no surcise from toil? Yes, long enough to conserve the health of the body. Long enough to fill up with the immeasurable bounty of nature—flower, bird, forest, stream, mountain, ocean. Ah, to keep close to these! To be intimate with them! To use them to the full as our own very property! For so they are, all hours; all mine, though I be a beegar. I am rich incompatably in aromatic and health giving mountain forests, in flower strewn prairies, in woodland and meadow with deep secrets of their multitudine life, in
vast oceans. 'Tis pitiful the things by which we are rich or poor,'—again says Emerson, our own philosopher, our matchless user of words—"Tis pitiful the things by which we are rich or poor,"—a matter of coins, coats and carpets, a little more or less stone, or wood or paint, the fashion of a cloak or hat; like the luck of naked Indians, of whom one is proud in the possession of a glass bead or a red feather, and the rest miserable in the want of it. But the treasures which nature spent itself to amass,—the secular, refined, composite anatomy of man, which all strata go to form, which the prior races, from infusory and saurian, existed to ripen, the surrounding plastic natures; the earth with its foods; the intellectual, temperamenting air; the sea with its initations; the heaven deep with worlds, and the answering brain and nervous structure replying to these; the eye that looketh into the deeps, which again look back to the eye, abyss to abyss;—these, not like a glass bead, or the coins or carpets, are given immeasurably to all This miracle is hurled into every beggar's hands."
And now specifically as to your way here. Wide and inviting as the field is, I am going to touch but one thing. It is common with college men, after a longer or shorter experience with the world activities, and greater or less embarrassment by reason of the lack of practical availability of their college training, to assert with emphasis that extreme specialization in education—that is the thing And it is a dangerous plea, dangerously effective and menancing. stand here to combat it with all my strength, and never more confident of my ground. I do not have to plead for the higher education in this presence. That is what you are here tor. But it is the higher education that picks out one particular star, and pushes after it unregardless of all the glorious constellations that beset the way. In my mind the higher education is also the broader education and I plead for that. The plea for over-specification is the plea of the almighty dollar. The plea for broad and comprehensive culture is the plea of the higher life. Everywhere young men are rushing straight from the cowl culture of the high school into the law school, or worse still, into the lawyer's office; straight to the counting house pell-mell into every avenue of gain, unwilling to money getting the rich four years of the college course And everywhere young men in our colleges, under generous elections, are taking the narrowest road and the shortest cut to some special degree that will yield quick pecuniary returns. It was a wise man who said that the educational man is he who knows something of everything and a great deal of one thing. And having said so much. I am now ready to say that specialization is a great thing, an indispensable thing, the money getter, a world mover. Only, let it be built upon a foundation of wide and generous and Catholic culture. What is our education for? The answer comes quick from many sides, "To enable us to get a living," Well, yes, that is first; but I beg you to make the important distinction that it is not all and it is not chief. I utterly misapprehend its ultimate purpose if it is not to equip us to lead more sane and full and rational lives, to desire more wholesome and reasonable things, to apprehend something more of God's universe and the possibilities of life than the mere scraping together of dollars and the mere ministering to the wants and weaknesses of the body—if it is not to make us more resourceful for happiness for ourselves and for others, and to strengthen us against the deadening and disheartening things of life. The learned and eloquent
Continued on Page 2.
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