CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER I.
FIRST,
BE A MAN.The
great need at this hour is manly men. We want no goody-goody piety;
we have too much of it. We want men who will do right, though the
heavens fall, who believe in God, and who will confess Him. —Rev.
W. J. Dawson.All
the world cries, Where is the man who will save us? We want a man!
Don't look so far for this man. You have him at hand. This man—it
is you, it is I; it is each one of us!... How to constitute one's
self a man? Nothing harder, if one knows not how to will it; nothing
easier, if one wills it. —Alexander Dumas."I
thank God I am a Baptist," said a little, short Doctor of
Divinity, as he mounted a step at a convention. "Louder!
louder!" shouted a man in the audience; "we can't hear."
"Get up higher," said another. "I can't," replied
the doctor, "to be a Baptist is as high as one can get."But
there is something higher than being a Baptist, and that is being a
man.Rousseau
says: "According to the order of nature, men being equal, their
common vocation is the profession of humanity; and whoever is well
educated to discharge the duty of a man cannot be badly prepared to
fill any of those offices that have a relation to him. It matters
little to me whether my pupil be designed for the army, the pulpit,
or the bar. To live is the profession I would teach him. When I have
done with him, it is true he will be neither a soldier, a lawyer, nor
a divine. Let him
first be a man;
Fortune may remove him from one rank to another, as she pleases, he
will be always found in his place.""First
of all," replied the boy James A. Garfield, when asked what he
meant to be, "I must make myself a man; if I do not succeed in
that, I can succeed in nothing.""Hear
me, O men," cried Diogenes, in the market place at Athens; and,
when a crowd collected around him, he said scornfully, "I called
for men, not pigmies."One
great need of the world to-day is for men and women who are good
animals. To endure the strain of our concentrated civilization, the
coming man and woman must have an excess of animal spirits. They must
have a robustness of health. Mere absence of disease is not health.
It is the overflowing fountain, not the one half full, that gives
life and beauty to the valley below. Only he is healthy who exults in
mere animal existence; whose very life is a luxury; who feels a
bounding pulse throughout his body; who feels life in every limb, as
dogs do when scouring over the field, or as boys do when gliding over
fields of ice.Dispense
with the doctor by being temperate; the lawyer by keeping out of
debt; the demagogue, by voting for honest men; and poverty, by being
industrious."Nephew,"
said Sir Godfrey Kneller, the artist, to a Guinea slave trader, who
entered the room where his uncle was talking with Alexander Pope,
"you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men in the
world." "I don't know how great men you may be," said
the Guinea man, as he looked contemptuously upon their diminutive
physical proportions, "but I don't like your looks; I have often
bought a much better man than either of you, all muscles and bones,
for ten guineas."A
man is never so happy as when he suffices to himself, and can walk
without crutches or a guide. Said Jean Paul Richter: "I have
made as much out of myself as could be made of the stuff, and no man
should require more.""The
body of an athlete and the soul of a sage," wrote Voltaire to
Helvetius; "these are what we require to be happy."Although
millions are out of employment in the United States, how difficult it
is to find a thorough, reliable, self-dependent, industrious man or
woman, young or old, for any position, whether as a domestic servant,
an office boy, a teacher, a brakeman, a conductor, an engineer, a
clerk, a bookkeeper, or whatever we may want. It is almost impossible
to find a really
competent person in
any department, and oftentimes we have to make many trials before we
can get a position fairly well filled.It
is a superficial age; very few prepare for their work. Of thousands
of young women trying to get a living at typewriting, many are so
ignorant, so deficient in the common rudiments even, that they spell
badly, use bad grammar, and know scarcely anything of punctuation. In
fact, they murder the English language. They can copy, "parrot
like," and that is about all.The
same superficiality is found in nearly all kinds of business. It is
next to impossible to get a first-class mechanic; he has not learned
his trade; he has picked it up, and botches everything he touches,
spoiling good material and wasting valuable time.In
the professions, it is true, we find greater skill and faithfulness,
but usually they have been developed at the expense of mental and
moral breadth.The
merely professional man is narrow; worse than that, he is in a sense
an artificial man, a creature of technicalities and specialties,
removed alike from the broad truth of nature and from the healthy
influence of human converse. In society, the most accomplished man of
mere professional skill is often a nullity; he has sunk his
personality in his dexterity."The
aim of every man," said Humboldt, "should be to secure the
highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete
and consistent whole."Some
men impress us as immense possibilities. They seem to have a sweep of
intellect that is grand; a penetrative power that is phenomenal; they
seem to know everything, to have read everything, to have seen
everything. Nothing seems to escape the keenness of their vision. But
somehow they are forever disappointing our expectations. They raise
great hopes only to dash them. They are men of great promise, but
they never pay. There is some indefinable want in their make-up.What
the world needs is a clergyman who is broader than his pulpit, who
does not look upon humanity with a white neckcloth ideal, and who
would give the lie to the saying that the human race is divided into
three classes: men, women and ministers. Wanted, a clergyman who does
not look upon his congregation from the standpoint of old theological
books, and dusty, cobweb creeds, but who sees the merchant as in his
store, the clerk as making sales, the lawyer pleading before the
jury, the physician standing over the sick bed; in other words, who
looks upon the great throbbing, stirring, pulsing, competing,
scheming, ambitious, impulsive, tempted, mass of humanity as one of
their number, who can live with them, see with their eyes, hear with
their ears, and experience their sensations.The
world has a standing advertisement over the door of every profession,
every occupation, every calling: "Wanted—A Man."Wanted,
a lawyer, who has not become the victim of his specialty, a mere
walking bundle of precedents.Wanted,
a shopkeeper who does not discuss markets wherever he goes. A man
should be so much larger than his calling, so broad and symmetrical
in his culture, that he would not talk shop in society, that no one
would suspect how he gets his living.Nothing
is more apparent in this age of specialties than the dwarfing,
crippling, mutilating influence of occupations or professions.
Specialties facilitate commerce, and promote efficiency in the
professions, but are often narrowing to individuals. The spirit of
the age tends to doom the lawyer to a narrow life of practice, the
business man to a mere money-making career.Think
of a man, the grandest of God's creations, spending his life-time
standing beside a machine for making screws. There is nothing to call
out his individuality, his ingenuity, his powers of balancing,
judging, deciding.He
stands there year after year, until he seems but a piece of
mechanism. His powers, from lack of use, dwindle to mediocrity, to
inferiority, until finally he becomes a mere part of the machine he
tends.Wanted,
a man who will not lose his individuality in a crowd, a man who has
the courage of his convictions, who is not afraid to say "No,"
though all the world say "Yes."Wanted,
a man who, though he is dominated by a mighty purpose, will not
permit one great faculty to dwarf, cripple, warp, or mutilate his
manhood; who will not allow the over-development of one faculty to
stunt or paralyze his other faculties.Wanted,
a man who is larger than his calling, who considers it a low estimate
of his occupation to value it merely as a means of getting a living.
Wanted, a man who sees self-development, education and culture,
discipline and drill, character and manhood, in his occupation.As
Nature tries every way to induce us to obey her laws by rewarding
their observance with health, pleasure and happiness, and punishes
their violation by pain and disease, so she resorts to every means to
induce us to expand and develop the great possibilities she has
implanted within us. She nerves us to the struggle, beneath which all
great blessings are buried, and beguiles the tedious marches by
holding up before us glittering prizes, which we may almost touch,
but never quite possess. She covers up her ends of discipline by
trial, of character building through suffering by throwing a splendor
and glamour over the future; lest the hard, dry facts of the present
dishearten us, and she fail in her great purpose. How else could
Nature call the youth away from all the charms that hang around young
life, but by presenting to his imagination pictures of future bliss
and greatness which will haunt his dreams until he resolves to make
them real. As a mother teaches her babe to walk, by holding up a toy
at a distance, not that the child may reach the toy, but that it may
develop its muscles and strength, compared with which the toys are
mere baubles; so Nature goes before us through life, tempting us with
higher and higher toys, but ever with one object in view—the
development of the man.In
every great painting of the masters there is one idea or figure which
stands out boldly beyond everything else. Every other idea or figure
on the canvas is subordinate to this idea or figure, and finds its
real significance not in itself, but, pointing to the central idea,
finds its true expression there. So in the vast universe of God,
every object of creation is but a guide-board with an index finger
pointing to the central figure of the created universe—Man. Nature
writes this thought upon every leaf; she thunders it in every
creation; it exhales from every flower; it twinkles in every star.Open
thy bosom, set thy wishes wide,And
let in manhood—let in happiness;Admit
the boundless theatre of thoughtFrom
nothing up to God ... which makes a man!—Young.
