A prominent lawyer of Boston once told me that the great impulse to total abstinence came to him when a young man, from hearing his fellow lawyers talking over their cups. The most vital secrets of their clients' business were made public property when their tongues were loosened by wine; and this led him to the firm resolution that nothing should go into his mouth which would prevent him from keeping it closed unless he wanted to open it.
The time will come when the only opening for the ambitious man of intemperate habits will be in politics. It is rapidly becoming so now.
Private employers dare not trust their business to the man who drinks. The great corporations dare not. He is not wanted on the railroads. The steamship lines have long since cast him off. The banks dare not use him.
He cannot keep accounts. Only the people, long-suffering and generous, remain as his resource. For this reason municipal government is his specialty; and while this patience of the people lasts, our cities will breed scandals as naturally as our swamps breed malaria. Already the business of the century recognizes the truth of all this. The bonding companies ask, before they sign a contract, whether the official in question uses liquor, what kind of liquor, whether he smokes, gambles, or in other ways so conducts himself that in five years he will be less of a man than he is now.
The great corporations ask the same questions as to all their employees.
Even these organizations called "soulless" know the value of men, and that the vices of to-day must be reckoned at compound interest and charged against their estimate of the young man's future. The Twentieth Century must be temperate; for only sober men can bear the strain of its enterprises.
Equally dangerous is the search for the joys of love by those who would shirk all love's responsibilities. Just as honest love is the most powerful influence that can enter into a man's life, so is love's counterfeit the most disintegrating. Happiness cannot spring from the ashes of lust. Love looks toward the future. Its glory is its altruism. To shirk responsibility is to destroy the home. The equal marriage demands equal purity of heart, equal chastity of intention. Open vice brings with certainty disease and degradation. Secret lust comes to the same end, but all the more surely because the folly of lying is added to other sources of decay. That society is so severe in its condemnation of "the double life" is an expression of the bitterness of its experience. The real character of a man is measured by the truth he shows to women. His ideal of womankind is gauged by the character of the woman he seeks.
In general, the sinner is not the man who sets out in life to be wicked.
Few men are born wicked; many are born weak. False ideas of manliness; false conceptions of good fellowship, which false ideas of the relationship of men and women give, wreck many a young man of otherwise good intentions.
The sinner is the man who cannot say no. The fall through vice to sin is a matter of slow transition. One virtue after another is yielded up as the strain on the will becomes too great. In Kipling's fable of Parenness, the demon appears before the clerk in the Indian service, who has been too long a good fellow among the boys. It asks him to surrender three things in succession: his trust in man, his faith in woman, then the hopes and ambitions of his childhood. When these are given up, as they must be in the life of dissipation, the demon leaves him in exchange a little crust of dry bread. Bare existence without joy or hope is all that the demon can give when the forces of life are burned out.
In our colleges, the one ethical principle kept before the athlete by his associates is this: Never break training rules. The pitcher who smokes a cigarette throws away his game. The punter who spends the night at a dance loses his one chance of making a goal. The sprinter who takes the glass of convivial beer breaks no record. His record breaks him. Some day we shall realize that the game of life is more than the game of foot-ball. We have work every day more intricate than pitching curves, more strenuous than punting the ball. We must keep in trim for it. We must hold ourselves in repair. We must remember training rules. When this is done, we shall win not only games and races, but the great prizes of life. Almost half the strength of the men of America is now wasted in dissipation, gross or petty, in drink or smoke. This strength would be saved could we remember training rules. Through the training rules of our fathers we have come to consider as part of our inheritance the Puritan Conscience. As the success of our nation is built upon this conscience, so in like fashion depends upon it the success of our daily life.
I had a friend once, a mining man of some education, who made his fortune in bonanza days in Nevada, and who drank up what he had made with the boys who have long since passed away. As a hopeless sot he visited the gold cure at Los Gatos. Not finding much relief, he walked over to Palo Alto to borrow of me his fare to San Francisco. He said that he was going to pawn his goods for a fare to Nevada, where he meant to kill himself. Whether he did so or not, I do not know; for ten years have gone by and I have never heard of him again.
As he sat in my room, haggard, bloodshot, ragged, gin-flavored, a little boy who had then never known sin, came in, and being no respecter of persons, took him for a man and offered him his hand.
Being taken for a man, brought him back his manhood for a moment. The visions of evil left him, and from Dickens' poem of "The Children" he repeated almost to himself these words:--
"'I know now how Jesus could liken The Kingdom of God to a child.'"
The old scene came back to him. When the Master was teaching, the children crowded about him, and there were those who would send them away. But the Master said, "No, let the little children come unto me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." And again he said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." And again those whose services the Lord of the centuries could use, he likened to little children.
And of the many ways in which this likeness can be used this is one. The child is born with brain and nervous system adequate to its many purposes in life, if it is suffered to grow naturally, to become what God meant it to be. There are not many children of sin not made so by vice, intemperance, lust, and obscenity. They are victims of their elders' folly, of our carelessness as to their environment. Half the troubles of men of our race come through self-inflicted injury to the nervous system. We are tormented by the "fool-killer." If we could revert to the child's simple purity, the free movement of its machinery of life, we should find ourselves in a new heaven on a new earth. We could understand for ourselves part of what the Master meant. We should know now how Jesus could liken the Kingdom of God to a child.
All forms of subjective enjoyment, all pleasures that begin and end with self, unrelated to external things, are insane and unwholesome, destructive alike to rational enjoyment and to effectiveness in life. And this is true of spurious emotions alike, whether the pious ecstasies of a half-starved monk, the neurotic imaginings of a sentimental woman, or the riots of a debauchee. He is the wise man who for all his life can keep mind and soul and body clean.
"I know of no more encouraging fact," says Thoreau, "than the ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects beautiful. It is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. This morally we can do."
If it were ever my fortune in speaking to young men to become eloquent, with the only real eloquence there is, the plain speaking of a living truth, this I would say:--
Your first duty in life is toward your after-self. So live that your after-self--the man you ought to be--may in his time be possible and actual. Far away in the twenties, the thirties, of the Twentieth Century he is awaiting his turn. His body, his brain, his soul are in your boyish hands. He cannot help himself. What will you leave for him? Will it be a brain unspoiled by lust or dissipation, a mind trained to think and act, a nervous system true as a dial in its response to the truth about you? Will you, boy of the Twentieth Century, let him come as a man among men in his time, or will you throw away his inheritance before he has had the chance to touch it? Will you turn over to him a brain distorted, a mind diseased, a will untrained to action, a spinal cord grown through and through with the devil grass of that vile harvest we call wild oats? Will you let him come, taking your place, gaining through your experiences, hallowed through your joys, building on them his own, or will you fling his hope away, decreeing wanton-like that the man you might have been shall never be?
This is your problem in life, the problem of more importance to you than any or all others. How will you solve it? Will you meet it as a man or as a fool? When you answer this, we shall know what use the Twentieth Century can make of you.
"Death is a thing cleaner than Vice," Owen Wister tells us, and in the long run it is more profitable.
Charles R. Brown tells us of the old physician showing the physical effects of vice in the Museum of Pathology. "Almighty God writes a very plain hand." This is what he said. In every failure as in every success in the Twentieth Century, this plain hand can be plainly traced. "By their long memories the gods are known." This is an older form of the very same great lesson, the "goodness and severity of God."
Those who control the spiritual thought of the Twentieth Century will be religious men. They will not be religious in the fashion of monks, ascetics, mystic dreamers, or emotional enthusiasts. They will not be active in debating societies, discussing the intricacies of creeds. Neither will they be sticklers as to details in religious millinery. They will be simple, earnest, God-fearing, because they have known the God that makes for righteousness. Their religion of the Twentieth Century will be its working theory of life. It will be expressed in simple terms or it may not be expressed at all, but it will be deep graven in the heart. In wise and helpful life it will find ample justification. It will deal with the world as it is in the service of "the God of things as they are." It will find this world not "a vale of tears," a sink of iniquity, but a working paradise in which the rewards of right doing are instant and constant. It will find indeed that "His service is perfect freedom," for all things large or small within the reach of human effort are done in His way and in His way only.
Whittier tells us of the story of the day in Connecticut in 1780, when the horror of great darkness came over the land, and all men feared the dreaded Day of Judgment had come at last.
The Legislature of Connecticut, "dim as ghosts" in the old State House, wished to adjourn to put themselves in condition for the great assizes.
Meanwhile, Abraham Davenport, representative from Stamford rose to say:--
"This may well be The Day of Judgment for which the world awaits; But be it so or not, I only know My present duty and my Lord's command To occupy till He come.
So at the Post where He hath set me in His Providence, I choose for one to meet Him face to face.
Let God do His work. We will see to ours."
Then he took up a discussion of an act relating to the fisheries of alewife and shad, speaking to men who felt them obliged to stand by their duty, though never expecting to see shad, or alewife, or even Connecticut again.
"Glad did I live and gladly die, And I lay me down with a will."
This was Stevenson's word. "Let God do His work; we will see to ours." And in whatever part of God's Kingdom we men of the Twentieth Century may find ourselves, we shall know that we are at home. For the same hand that made the world and the ages created also the men in whose hands the final outcome of the wayward centuries finds its place within the Kingdom of Heaven.