YE 188TH LESSON. Wealth and High Endeavor. It matters not for his good to the world if one be rich or poor. More poor men, in the old and later times, have done good than rich men. Among the former were Jesus (if, as Josephus says, "it be lawful to call him a man") his early apostles and before him, Socrates and Epictetus (a slave) and Buddha (a prince who renounced a throne and wealth to serve mankind) and many other reformers, philosophers and poets (like Homer, a beggar), and historians (like Herodotus, the father of history) and, indeed whoever has done most good has ignored wealth. There have been philosophers like Seneca, Nero's instructor (whom the tyrant deprived of life), and Marcus Aurelius (the emperor of Rome) and Cicero (the first of Romans in oratory and philosophy)—rich men. In modern times the list of poor men and poor men's sons, who have risen to distinction for noble deeds done, is much longer than that of rich men and rich men's sons. But rich men have not found, nor do they now find, the road to well-doing shut up before them any more than have poor men. The way is open to all; for it takes so little to satisfy natural wants as to render practically indifferent the matter of poverty or riches, to him who would devote his life to doing good. Mr. Carnegie, a rich man, establishes libraries, so that books, written mostly by poor men and poor men's sons, may be read by all who would be well informed. It is not a question of wealth, much or little, for the welfare of mankind; but of the right kind of men and women. One man, like Robert Burns or Whittier, or Longfellow or Thoreau or Hawthorn, or Tennyson, or Robert G. Ingersoll, or one woman like Mrs. Stowe or Florence Nightengale, or Dorothy Dix, and hundreds of others, men and women, is worth more to the world than all the surplus wealth of earth. Enough of anything is sufficient. More than enough is an encumbrance. What was not Washington or Lincoln worth to America? All the gold of the Klondike is as nothing weighed in the balance against one of them or like them. Why rush off to the gold mines? What is in them worth the procuring? Nothing, if we see, on the other hand, the mine to be worked in the human soul. Let us rather have men and women of mental and moral worth. How many great souls were taken off in the Japanese and Russian war? and how many were lost to the world in our fratricidal war of the sixties that would have been great benefactors to mankind-intellectually and morally, if spared to reach old age! "But what may I do?" does the reader ask? What do? Feed the little birds in winter if you see no other good to do. Do the most good you can. Take into your home the orphan child and bring it up rightly. May be it is an angel you are entertaining unawares. Edgar Allen Poe was an orphan boy. He lived and died miserably. Why? Because he lacked something. Not so much did he lack money as he lacked a true self-respect-a "thought"—a proper ideal of life of regard for self-hood-a true philosophy of duty-a single thought. Had that been imparted to him or to Burns in youth-a deep-seated horror of the drink-curse-how much would have been the gain to the world and to each of them! Given the divine idea: "I will be as I would all men and women should be." and you are divine. The idea "how to live" is not far to seek; it is not obscure. An instinctive knowledge of right belongs to each, inherited from the ages past? "The Gentiles," St. Paul says, "show the work of the law written in their hearts; and their consciences bearing witness and their thoughts accusing or else excusing one another." Say "I will lose no opportunity of doing a favor" (Socrates); think only of what you may do to hasten the incoming of the Kingdom of God, and you will never have ennui AN INTOLERABLE EVIL 255 the "blues"-never care what you have to eat or to drink or to wear, or whether on a board or a feather bed you sleep or beneath a clapboard roof or a golden dome-all the same to you as to the soldier in the field. You are in the chase-not to kill even a harmless hare, but to make life sweeter to some creature, beast, bird or man. Ignore happiness and she will embrace you; pursue her and she will escape you. You cannot give joy to another-not even to a dumb creature-without its bringing greater joy to yourself. It is literally true that "it is more blessed to give than to receive." No one wrapped up in self can be happy. I would rather die on the scaffold if thereby the world might be made better, than to be the richest man on earth and own the finest horses, the costliest automobiles, the grandest dwelling, or yacht, spending my summers at the most fashionable resorts, eating the costliest viands, drinking the rarest wines, and so pass through life and leave the world without having done good. "A man," says Seneca, "cannot be a good protector of his country, a good avenger of her wrongs, a good defender of his friends, if he be inclined to pleasures." YE 189TH LESSON. Solomon says: An Intolerable Evil. "Whatsover thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." Yes, in what we take part we should work earnestly, and do nothing that we have not at heart. One doing what he would not have his wife and children do, does wrong. Every husband and father should say: "I will eat and drink nothing not prescribed by a physician that I will not place on the home table for my whole family to partake of." Does he sneak into the drink-hell and fill up on what if his wife even ventured to taste he would at once sue for a divorce? Let the wife drink as he does and the awfulness of the drink crime becomes apparent even to the moderate drinker. Why worse for her than for him? Ruin, descends upon the home in the end in either case. Accursed-ever accursed is the drink evil! The family is the unit of society. What kind of a world have we? Go into the families and see. It is all there-all of happiness and misery. Devotion to home and wife and children is devotion to God. To God alone? Not so. It is devotion to country as well. He alone is a patriot and a good man who loves his home and is good to his wife and his children. He never spends a moment outside of the home circle that he can help. When he goes out to "have a good time" he takes his wife and his children along with him to participate in it. That is one of the characteristically good qualities of the German. He goes to the beer garden; but frau and the little ones go along with him. He does not believe it wrong to sip a glass of beer as he munches the pretzel and chats with a neighbor, while frau and neighbors sip theirs too. Good man is Herr Kaufmann! for he does nothing he thinks wrong and that wife and children are barred doing. However much mistaken (and I think him very much so in upholding in this country by his example the drink practice) he is honest and believes he is doing right. All honor to the libertyloving German! He loves his home and treats his wife as a companion and an equal. It was always so with the German even in most distant times, as the Roman Historian Livy affirms. But no intelligent American believes it right to drink intoxicants of any kind as a beverage. Yet there are those who drink. But does the demoralized American care a fig for wife and family while he drinks, treats and is treated in the drink-hells? He cares for nothing and for nobody. He has lost his head. "He is a fool," are the words most truthfully and appropriately said of him. He is criminal as well-cruel and inhuman. How his wife grieves because of his neglect. Frequently he returns home, even from his work during the week, late at night and often not before daylight, having spent the whole night in wassail. And his Sundays he spends away from home in the same way. His love and devotion are all that this world has for the heart-broken wife. How lonely and sad a world for her because of his uncalled for, unkind, cruel and inhuman neglect and ill treatment. God pity such a fool and madman! The poor, disconsolate wife contemplates suicide-refuge from unbearable wrong! -the grave an asylum for her grief! Here is misery indeed! Domestic trouble! Nothing more awful! "Divorce." Can that repair a broken heart? Never! Oh the curse of drink! Sixty thousand divorces in the United States the past year!-two hundred thousand children so made orphans-drink the principal cause! While alcohol in rivers runs, As ever left the court of Hell! May all the Wrath, and Hate, and Scorn, Be armed against thy hateful life, With sharpened spear and poisoned knife, And may thy cruel heart soon feel The vengeful bite of hungry steel! Let us, with right hand upraised toward heaven, swear that we will resist in every honorable and peaceful, and manly, and lawful way the licensing of the evil in our midst; and let self-respect have mastery over us always. True self-respect would just as soon Meet Death as enter a saloon- YE 190TH LESSON. A Happy Life. A life lived as it should be is a happy life. How is that? As the birds live "in accordance with their own natures." (Seneca.) And the same philosopher says: "Every man is able of himself to make himself happy." How? He must be content when nature's wants are satisfied. (Timothy vi: 8.) What are those wants? "The body wants protection from the cold and the means of allaying hunger and thirst; all desires beyond these are vices." (Seneca.) If one is frugal, dresses plainly, lives temperately, acquires no unnatural desires or appetites, wrongs no one, does well his part as a good citizen, is self-respecting, weds a wife like-minded with himself, then will he be happy. In no circumstances can life be other than happy to the right-minded. If worse come what does he say? "What others have borne I can bear." "The wise man delights in what he has. External circumstances have very little importance to the wise man either for good or for evil; he is neither elated by prosperity or depressed by adversity; for he depends on himself and receives all his joys from himself." (Seneca.) And further Seneca says: "There is nothing so hard and difficult that the mind of man cannot overcome it, and with which unremitting study will not render him familiar, nor are there any passions so fierce and independent that they cannot be tamed by discipline. The THE CHRISTIAN LAW. mind can carry out whatever orders it gives itself. 257 Shall not we then call in the aid of patience, we whom such a prize awaits: the unbroken calm of a happy life?" Again: "The culture of any of the virtues is easy while vices require great expense." (Seneca.) "To him and to her who live according to the best principle in them will result a happy life." (Aristotle.) "A happy man is he who is moderately supplied with external goods, who has done the most honorable deeds and lived temperately." (Solon.) "The vulgar live according to the dictates of passion and pursue their own peculiar pleasures and means of gratifying them. Now he that is to be a good man and happy must have been educated well and have been made to form good habits, continue to live under good institutions, never practice what is bad either involuntarily or voluntarily, and this by living in obedience to some intelligent principle and some right regulation which has the power of enforcing its decrees. Men hate those individuals who oppose their appetites even if they do rightly. It is the duty of every individual to contribute to the virtue of his children and friends,-at least to make this his deliberate purpose." (Aristotle.) "Neither is a horse elated and proud of his manger and trappings, nor a bird of the little shreds of cloth of his nest; but both of them are proud of their swiftness. Do you then not be greatly proud of your food and dress, and in short of any external things; but be proud of your integrity and good deeds." (Epictetus.) "Try how the life of a good man suits thee; the life of him who is satisfied with his portion out of the whole and satisfied with his own just acts and benevolent disposition. Be like a promontory against which the waves continually break, but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it. Thou canst pass life in an equable flow of happiness if thou canst go by the right way and think and act in the right way." (Antoninus.). But there is an essential want of human nature not considered abovecompanionship. "It is not good for man to be alone." To be forsaken by the one we love brings grief that no philosophy will allay. This attachment is instinctive. Our fore-parents for millenniums of years have stood by each other throughout the length of their lives as a rule. The instinctive tie rudely broken what misery ensues! The grief is overwhelming. How many on account of the rash severence of this tie die by their own hands! How many commit murder before taking their own lives! Awful tragedies ensue, the whole family slain! To be happy constancy is essential in the marital relation. No philosophy is adequate to meet the occasion of broken troth. Here instinct gains the mastery of the human mind and reason is dethroned. YE 191ST LESSON. The Christian Law. It is a new morning for all the world. As Japan has suddenly emerged from a low estate of Pagan helplessness to one of might and triumphant glory so all peoples are about to rise up to newness of life. We are savages yet in one most important respect. It is in relation to personal habits. The cause of this is the incubus of outgrown and effete religions that hold to the dead past. We carry them a corpse bound to our backs. Our religions are ineffectual as a moral or ethical force affecting the young; and the school deals only with intellect and not as it might with the moral nature effectively. The youth grow up on the moral side like weeds. The darkest hour just before day is upon us. Never was a time when so enlightened a clergy-so liberal, thoughtful and well-educated an army of Christian teachers were to the front. They are handicapped by tradition. Like the Chinese teachers they have too long looked backward instead of forward. We have now little use for the dead past. Is there any good in old creeds?-in mediaeval "plans of salvation?" Not a bit. The clergy is beginning to move away from this condition. The only hindrance is Ignorance seated in the pews. Timidly the clergy are feeling their way out. Says one (Rev. Fifer of Des Moines, Iowa.): "The attempt was made by the religious leaders of his time to confine Jesus to every old form, definition, practice and belief. He would not allow himself to obey a religion which fasted many times a week and tithed the smallest seeds, while it permitted a widow's need to be the opportunity for gain, and scorned the right of the common man to sonship with God. So Jesus Christ, never braver, never truer, never more fareseeing, announced this truth: 'Men must put new wine into new bottles.' No age, no creed can contain all the truth. New truths must have new settings, new expressions, new opportunities. "This fact," he continues, "is illustrated in the rise of American institutions. The stern character of the Puritan, the almost reckless faith of the Pilgrim and the heroic love of freedom of the Roundhead could not be contained in old-world monarchical forms and institutions, sheltering class and unjust discriminations in politics, society and religion. The new world was a necessary abiding place. Mark you, God hid that world from discovery until the old-world forms had become old and the vine had produced new wine. "Hindrance to evolution means revolution. Russia finds it so. China has been a dreid and old wine bottle, a 'mummy' nation, while Japan has become a live, conquering giant. Everywhere in the history of nations the cause of Christ reads its warning. 'New wine must be put into new bottles.' "We must meet the demands of life today. 'New occasions teach new duties,' and the folly of the church is seen wherever it tries to evade or neglect demands by humanity for present guidance and relief. The world is sweeping onward. The generation after us is coming to a heritage of privilege and a heritage of duty never excelled. This faith in Christ must provide new methods, new fields, new forms of activity, new discoveries in power. The people are no longer isolated in scattered communities; they are crowded into cities; they are drawn near by steam and electric lines; the eastern continents are at our door; their populations are within a stone's throw. Our civilization has a diffusion of knowledge almost miraculous. "Think you it does not concern Christianity that books and papers and magazines and schools and entertainments and travels continually transform humanity? That the race of men are studying, questioning, seeking higher things of social welfare? We can not crowd the needs of our age into the forms of the past." There will be protests by "conservatives" (Pharisees) against the plain speaking of the author of these essays (ye old schoolmaster of ye olden time); but the time is near when all ministers will speak out just as plainly as does he in ye lessons. When they will say, "We must save the boys-must awaken their aspirations to things higher than cigarettes and swager and beastial behaviour. Let the men go. We can do little for or with them; but the boys (raw material of the best kind to work into finished goods) must command our care and attention above all others." 1 YE 192D LESSON. Twentieth Century Religion. It is identical in America with that of the first century after Christ in Palestine a religion of loving tenderness. And it is represented by every Christian order of our country. All are one. This oneness is recognized by all enlightened men and women. Of course ignorance and bigotry go together hand in hand. I am sure that all see and feel alike. But practical Christianity exists mainly ex-cathedra to-day. Where do we behold |