How many business men have made their greatest strides toward manhood, have developed their greatest virtues, when the reverses of fortune have swept away everything they had in the world; when disease had robbed them of all they held dear in life. Often we cannot see the angel in the quarry of our lives, the statue of manhood, until the blasts of misfortune have rent the ledge, and difficulties and obstacles have squared and chiseled the granite blocks into grace and beauty.
Many a man has been ruined into salvation. The lightning which smote his dearest hopes opened up a new rift in his dark life, and gave him glimpses of himself which, until then, he had never seen.
The grave buried his dearest hopes, but uncovered possibilities in his nature of patience, endurance, and hope which he never dreamed he possessed before.
"Adversity is a severe instructor," says Edmund Burke, "set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he loves us better too. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This conflict with difficulty makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial."
Men who have the right kind of material in them will a.s.sert their personality, and rise in spite of a thousand adverse circ.u.mstances.
You cannot keep them down. Every obstacle seems only to add to their ability to get on.
"Under different circ.u.mstances," says Castelar, "Savonarola would undoubtedly have been a good husband, a tender father, a man unknown to history, utterly powerless to print upon the sands of time and upon the human soul the deep trace which he has left, but misfortune came to visit him, to crush his heart, and to impart that marked melancholy which characterizes a soul in grief, and the grief that circled his brows with a crown of thorns was also that which wreathed them with the splendor of immortality. His hopes were centred in the woman he loved, his life was set upon the possession of her, and when her family finally rejected him, partly on account of his profession, and partly on account of his person, he believed that it was death that had come upon him, when in truth it was immortality."
The greatest men will ever be those who have risen from the ranks. It is said that there are ten thousand chances to one that genius, talent, and virtue shall issue from a farmhouse rather than from a palace.
The youth Opie earned his bread by sawing wood, but he reached a professorship in the Royal Academy. When but ten years old he showed the material he was made of by a beautiful drawing on a shingle.
Antonio Canova was the son of a day laborer. Thorwaldsen"s parents were poor, but, like hundreds of others, they did with their might what their hands found to do, and enn.o.bled their work. They rose by being greater than their calling, as Arkwright rose above mere barbering, Bunyan above tinkering, Wilson above shoemaking, Lincoln above rail-splitting, and Grant above tanning. By being first-cla.s.s barbers, tinkers, shoemakers, rail-splitters, tanners, they acquired the power which enabled them to become great inventors, authors, statesmen, generals.
Adversity exasperates fools, dejects cowards, draws out the faculties of the wise and industrious, puts the modest to the necessity of trying their skill, awes the opulent, and makes the idle industrious. Neither do uninterrupted success and prosperity qualify men for usefulness and happiness. The storms of adversity, like those of the ocean, rouse the faculties, and excite the invention, prudence, skill, and fort.i.tude of the voyager. The martyrs of ancient times, in bracing their minds to outward calamities, acquired a loftiness of purpose and a moral heroism worth a lifetime of softness and security. A man upon whom continuous sunshine falls is like the earth in August: he becomes parched and dry and hard and close-grained. Men have drawn from adversity the elements of greatness. If you have the blues, go and see the poorest and sickest families within your knowledge. The darker the setting, the brighter the diamond. Don"t run about and tell acquaintances that you have been unfortunate; people do not like to have unfortunate men for acquaintances.
Beethoven was almost totally deaf and burdened with sorrow when he produced his greatest works. Schiller wrote his best books in great bodily suffering. He was not free from pain for fifteen years. Milton wrote his leading productions when blind, poor, and sick. "Who best can suffer," said he, "best can do." Bunyan said that, if it were lawful, he could even pray for greater trouble, for the greater comfort"s sake.
"Do you know what G.o.d puts us on our backs for?" asked Dr. Payson, smiling, as he lay sick in bed. "No," replied the visitor. "In order that we may look upward." "I am not come to condole but to rejoice with you," said the friend, "for it seems to me that this is no time for mourning." "Well, I am glad to hear that," said Dr. Payson, "it is not often I am addressed in such a way. The fact is I never had less need of condolence, and yet everybody persists in offering it; whereas, when I was prosperous and well, and a successful preacher, and really needed condolence, they flattered and congratulated me."
A German knight undertook to make an immense Aeolian harp by stretching wires from tower to tower of his castle. When he finished the harp it was silent; but when the breezes began to blow he heard faint strains like the murmuring of distant music. At last a tempest arose and swept with fury over his castle, and then rich and grand music came from the wires. Ordinary experiences do not seem to touch some lives--to bring out any poetry, any higher manhood.
Not until the breath of the plague had blasted a hundred thousand lives, and the great fire had licked up cheap, shabby, wicked London, did she arise, phoenix-like, from her ashes and ruin, a grand and mighty city.
True salamanders live best in the furnace of persecution.
"Every man who makes a fortune has been more than once a bankrupt, if the truth were known," said Albion Tourgee. "Grant"s failure as a subaltern made him commander-in-chief, and for myself, my failure to accomplish what I set out to do led me to what I never had aspired to."
The appeal for volunteers in the great battle of life, in exterminating ignorance and error, and planting high on an everlasting foundation the banner of intelligence and right, is directed to _you_. Burst the trammels that impede your progress, and cling to hope. Place high thy standard, and with a firm tread and fearless eye press steadily onward.
Not ease, but effort, not facility, but difficulty, makes men.
Toilsome culture is the price of great success, and the slow growth of a great character is one of its special necessities. Many of our best poets
"Are cradled into poetry by wrong, And learn in suffering what they teach in song."
Byron was stung into a determination to go to the top by a scathing criticism of his first book, "Hours of Idleness," published when he was but nineteen years of age. Macaulay said, "There is scarce an instance in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence as Byron reached." In a few years he stood by the side of such men as Scott, Southey, and Campbell, and died at thirty-seven, that age so fatal to genius. Many an orator like "stuttering Jack Curran," or "Orator Mum,"
as he was once called, has been spurred into eloquence by ridicule and abuse.
This is the crutch age. "Helps" and "aids" are advertised everywhere.
We have inst.i.tutes, colleges, universities, teachers, books, libraries, newspapers, magazines. Our thinking is done for us. Our problems are all worked out in "explanations" and "keys." Our boys are too often tutored through college with very little study. "Short roads" and "abridged methods" are characteristic of the century. Ingenious methods are used everywhere to get the drudgery out of the college course. Newspapers give us our politics, and preachers our religion.
Self-help and self-reliance are getting old fashioned. Nature, as if conscious of delayed blessings, has rushed to man"s relief with her wondrous forces, and undertakes to do the world"s drudgery and emanc.i.p.ate him from Eden"s curse.
But do not misinterpret her edict. She emanc.i.p.ates from the lower only to call to the higher. She does not bid the world go and play while she does the work. She emanc.i.p.ates the muscles only to employ the brain and heart.
The most beautiful as well as the strongest characters are not developed in warm climates, where man finds his bread ready made on trees, and where exertion is a great effort, but rather in a trying climate and on a stubborn soil. It is no chance that returns to the Hindoo ryot a penny and to the American laborer a dollar for his daily toil; that makes Mexico with its mineral wealth poor, and New England with its granite and ice rich. It is rugged necessity, it is the struggle to obtain, it is poverty the priceless spur, that develops the stamina of manhood, and calls the race out of barbarism. Labor found the world a wilderness and has made it a garden.
As the sculptor thinks only of the angel imprisoned in the marble block, so Nature cares only for the man or woman shut up in the human being. The sculptor cares nothing for the block as such; Nature has little regard for the mere lump of breathing clay. The sculptor will chip off all unnecessary material to set free the angel. Nature will chip and pound us remorselessly to bring out our possibilities. She will strip us of wealth, humble our pride, humiliate our ambition, let us down from the ladder of fame, will discipline us in a thousand ways, if she can develop a little character. Everything must give way to that. Wealth is nothing, position is nothing, fame is nothing, _manhood is everything_.
Not ease, not pleasure, not happiness, but a _man_, Nature is after.
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 it, but pointing to the central idea, finds its true expression there. So in the vast universe of G.o.d, every object of creation is but a guideboard 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 is exhaled from every flower; it twinkles in every star.
Oh, what price will Nature not pay for a man! Ages and aeons were nothing for her to spend in preparing for his coming, or to make his existence possible. She has rifled the centuries for his development, and placed the universe at his disposal. The world is but his kindergarten, and every created thing but an object-lesson from the unseen universe. Nature resorts to a thousand expedients to develop a perfect type of her grandest creation. To do this she must induce him to fight his way up to his own loaf. She never allows him once to lose sight of the fact that it is the struggle to attain that develops the man. The moment we put our hand upon that which looks so attractive at a distance, and which we struggled so hard to reach, Nature robs it of its charm by holding up before us another prize still more attractive.
"Life," says a philosopher, "refuses to be so adjusted as to eliminate from it all strife and conflict and pain. There are a thousand tasks that, in larger interests than ours, must be done, whether we want them or no. The world refuses to walk upon tiptoe, so that we may be able to sleep. It gets up very early and stays up very late, and all the while there is the conflict of myriads of hammers and saws and axes with the stubborn material that in no other way can be made to serve its use and do its work for man. And then, too, these hammers and axes are not wielded without strain or pang, but swung by the millions of toilers who labor with their cries and groans and tears. Nay, our temple-building, whether it be for G.o.d or man, exacts its bitter toll, and fills life with cries and blows. The thousand rivalries of our daily business, the fiercer animosities when we are beaten, the even fiercer exultation when we have beaten, the crashing blows of disaster, the piercing scream of defeat,--these things we have not yet gotten rid of, nor in this life ever will. Why should we wish to get rid of them?
We are here, my brother, to be hewed and hammered and planed in G.o.d"s quarry and on G.o.d"s anvil for a n.o.bler life to come." Only the muscle that is used is developed.
The constantly cheerful man, who survives his blighted hopes and disappointments, who takes them just for what they are, lessons, and perhaps blessings in disguise, is the true hero.
There is a strength Deep bedded in our hearts of which we reck But little, till the shafts of heaven have pierced Its fragile dwelling. Must not earth be rent Before her gems are found?
MRS. HEMANS.
"If what shone afar so grand Turns to ashes in the hand, On again, the virtue lies In the struggle, not the prize."
"The hero is not fed on sweets, Daily his own heart he eats; Chambers of the great are jails, And head-winds right for royal sails."
"So many great Ill.u.s.trious spirits have conversed with woe, Have in her school been taught, as are enough To consecrate distress, and make ambition Even wish the frown beyond the smile of fortune."
Then welcome each rebuff, That turns earth"s smoothness rough, Each sting, that bids not sit nor stand but go.
BROWNING.
CHAPTER VI.
ONE UNWAVERING AIM.
Life is an arrow--therefore you must know What mark to aim at, how to use the bow-- Then draw it to the head and let it go.
HENRY VAN d.y.k.e.
The important thing in life is to have a great aim, and to possess the apt.i.tude and perseverance to attain it.--GOETHE.
Concentration alone conquers.--C. BUXTON.
"He who follows two hares is sure to catch neither."
"A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways."
Let every one ascertain his special business and calling, and then stick to it if he would be successful.--FRANKLIN.
"Digression is as dangerous as stagnation in the career of a young man in business."
Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius.--BULWER.