But come back in history with me a little way and let us see where these men and women are to be found. Go into northern England, and go down a coal shaft underground two miles, and there is a young man picking away at a vein of coal a foot and a half thick. His hair sticks out through his hat, his face is besmirched, his fingers are covered with soot. Yet he is digging away and whistling. Is he a king? One of the greatest the world has ever seen. Queen Victoria, introducing her son, who has since been king, to that young man, said to him:
"I introduce you, my son, to England"s greatest man."
What! This poor miner, who has never been to school but a few months in his life? While he had not been to a day school, he had been learning all the time in the university of experience, in the world"s great university--_every-day observation_. When such a man graduates he gets the highest possible degree--D.N.R.--"Don"t Need Recommends." Let us go in the mine and ask the miner his name.
"Young man, what is your name?"
"Stevenson."
The inventor of the locomotive itself! Oh, where are thy kings, oh, men?
They may be in the mine, on the mountain, in the hovel or the palace, wherever a man notices what other people have not seen. Wherever a man observes in his every-day work what other people have not noticed, there will be found the king.
Are any of my readers milkmen? Are you discouraged when the brooks freeze up in the winter? Now, there was a milkman in West Virginia, not many years ago, who went to the train every morning with the milk from the farm, and while they were putting the milk in the car he studied the locomotive standing in the station.
"What do you know about a locomotive?"
"Oh, I don"t know anything about it."
Is that so? You have seen and ridden after them all your lifetime, and you have seen them standing in the station, you have looked at the immense structure with some respect, but you don"t know anything about it--and then you expect to be a successful man! That young man became interested in the locomotive, and while he stood around there he watched it, measured it, asked the engineer questions about it. One day the engineer, seeing he was interested, took him down to the switch and showed him how to put on the steam, and how to shut it off, and how to reverse the engine, ring the bell, operate the whistle, and all about it, and he was delighted. He went home and made draftings in the evenings of the locomotive.
Two years after that the same train ran on the siding and the engineer and fireman went into a house to get their breakfast, leaving the locomotive alone--waiting for the snow to be shoveled off the track which had rolled down the mountain. While they were absent a valve of the engine accidentally opened. It started the piston, and the engine began to draw out the train on to the main track, and then it began to go down the fearful grade at full speed. The brakeman went out on the rear platform, caught hold of the wheel brake in order to slow down the train. When he saw the engineer and fireman at the top of the hill swinging their arms as though something awful had happened, the brakeman shouted:
"There is the engineer and fireman, both of them, up there. We will all be killed!"
The people fainted and screamed, and the cry went to the second car, and then to the baggage car, and that milkman was there. He ran to the side-door to leap, but saw that it would be certain death. Then, with the help of the baggage-man he clambered over the tender, reached the engineer"s place, and felt around for the lever in the smoke. When he discovered it he pressed it home. Then reversed the engine. It was a wonder those cylinder heads held. But with an awful crack the driving wheels stopped on the track, shot fire through the snow as they began to roll back against the ongoing train, the momentum still pushing it on.
It shook the train until every pane of gla.s.s was broken. When it came to a stop the pa.s.sengers climbed out to ascertain who stopped the train.
They discovered that this young man had done it, and saved their lives, and they thanked him with tears.
A stockholder in the railroad company, an old man nearly eighty years of age, was on the train. He went into the stockholders" meeting that night and told the story of his narrow escape on that train. Since then that milkman has been one of the richest railroad owners in the world.
What do you suppose has become of the other milkmen who went at the same time to the same place and sat on the edge of the platform and swung their feet? What has become of them?
Ask the winds that sweep down from the Alleghany mountains--where are the other milkmen? The winds will answer, "They are going to the pump there still."
It was ever the same. Wherever you look, success in any branch of achievement depends upon this ability to get one"s education every day as one goes along from the events that are around us now. The king is found wherever a person notices that which other men do not see.
IV
WHOM MANKIND SHALL LOVE
The great scientific men--and we need more--often are not given the full credit that is due them because they have not "graduated" from somewhere. It seems to me there is a feeling in these later days for creating an aristocracy among the men who have graduated from some rich university. But that does not determine a man"s life. It may be a foolish tyranny for a little while, but nevertheless every man and woman must finally take the place where he and she are best fitted to be, and do the things that he and she can do best, and the things about which he and she really know. Where they graduated, or when, will not long count in the race of practical life.
We need great scientific men now more than we ever needed them before.
Where are you going to find them? We won"t find them where that scientific man came from who invented an improvement upon the cuckoo clock. His clock, instead of saying, "Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo," when it struck the hour, said, "I love you! I love you! I love you!" That man left the clock at home with his wife nights while he was around at the club, thinking that would be sufficient protestation of his love. Yet any man knows you cannot make love by machinery. That was only a so-called scientific idea.
I read not long ago that a great scientific man said that "love and worship are only the aggregate results of physical causes." That is not true. Love and worship are something beyond physical causes. Educated men ought to know better than to say anything like that.
There are many valuable things that every man knows until he has unlearned them in a university.
There is danger that a man will get so much education that he won"t know anything of real value because his useless education has driven the useful out of his mind. It is like a dog I owned when a boy. He was a very good fox dog. One day I thought I would show him off before the boys. We let the fox out at the barn door, which was open just far enough for the dog to see the fox start. Then he began whining and yelping to get out. I ran out and dropped some red pepper where the dog was likely to follow the fox over the hill. Then I went back and opened the door. The dog rushed out after the fox, but soon began to take in the red pepper. Then he began to whine and yelp--and stopped, whirled around, and, rushing down to the brook, put his nose under the water.
From the time he graduated from that pepper university he never would follow a fox at all. He had added education in the wrong direction, and so it is often with these scientific men.
Do you know that the humblest man, whatever his occupation, really knows instinctively certain things better for not having been to school much?
It is so easy to bias the mind.
When the boy comes to learn geometry the teacher will say: "Two parallel lines will never run together." The boy may look up and ask, "What is the use of telling me that?" Every man knows that two parallel lines will never run together. But how does he know it? It is born with him.
His natural instincts tell that to him. It is what we call "an axiom"--a self-evident truth. It is above argument and beyond all possible reasoning. We know that "two halves are equal to the whole"! You know that when you cut an apple in half the two halves are equal to the whole of it. You tell that to a geometry cla.s.s, and they say: "I know that. Everybody knows it." Of course everybody does, because it is a natural scientific fact that you cannot reasonably question.
Ask a man, "Do you know that you exist?" He looks with astonishment and says: "Certainly! Don"t I know that I am? I know that I am here, that this is me, that I am not Mrs. Smith or some one else?"
Of course you do. But how do you know it? By a G.o.d-given instinct that came into the world with you.
No scientist or school on earth could disprove that, or prove it, either. It is a self-evident fact. I know that I am an intelligent personal ident.i.ty, and that I dwell in this body in some mysterious way.
I know that is my hand, but what I possess is not me. I know by an instinct infallible that I am a spiritual being, separate from this material. You know that. No scientist can prove or disprove it. It is a fact we all know. I know that I can never die, and you know it unless you have gotten educated out of it. It is in your very life; it is a part of your original instinct.
When some graduate of some great university shall come to you, young man, and say, "I can prove to you that the Bible is not true," or, "I can prove to you that your religion is false," you can say to him: "You are nothing but an educated fool. Because the more you have studied the less truth you seem to know."
It is only one"s own personal self that can know his own religious instincts. It is only himself that can know whether he is in spiritual relation to G.o.d or not. No education on earth can overturn the fact, although wrong study may confuse the mind.
When a man comes to me, with his higher education, to overturn religion, it reminds me of what Artemus Ward said to that lordly graduate of Oxford and Cambridge. This man told Ward that he was disgusted with his shows. Artemus Ward asked him, "What do you know about these shows?" and he said: "I know everything about them. I graduated from two universities." Then Artemus Ward said, "You remind me of a farmer in Maine who had a calf that stole the milk of two cows, and the more milk he got the greater calf he was." Such is the effect sometimes of education on religious life--the more mental education of some kind which you get the less you may know about your natural religious instincts.
There is a great need to-day, and prayers go up to heaven now for men and women whom _mankind shall love_--love because they are great benefactors; love because, while they are making money or gaining fame or honor for themselves, they are blessing humanity all the way along. I must not argue now. I will ill.u.s.trate, because you can remember the ill.u.s.trations and you might forget an argument.
There is a great need for artists. There never was such a need in the progress of Christian civilization as there is now for great painters.
All these walls ought to be covered with magnificent paintings teaching some great divine truth, and every school-house, yes, every barn, ought to have some picture upon it that will instruct and inspire. All our children seek to go to the moving pictures, and that shows what an agency there is in pictures for the instruction of mankind. We need artists by the thousands. It is not a surprise to me that a New York man is getting a salary of $35,000 a year for moving-picture work because "he notices something other people have not seen." It is no surprise that a great store in that city pays an advertising man $21,000 a year salary. He can see what the rest of the public does not see.
We need great artists, hundreds of them. Where are you going to find them? You will say "at the art school, in the National Gallery in London, or at the Louvre in Paris, or in Rome." Well, it may be that you will. But it is an unfortunate thing for your theory that one of the greatest painters in America painted with a cat"s tail. It is another enlightening thing that the man who received the highest prize at the World"s Fair in Chicago for a landscape painting never took "a lesson"
in color or drawing in his life.
But that doesn"t argue against lessons nor against schools or universities. Don"t misunderstand me in this. I am only making emphatic my special subject.
He took the highest prize and never went to an art school in his life.
If he had attended school the teacher might have tried to show him something and thus weakened his mind. The teacher in a school who shows a child anything that that child could work out for himself is a curse to that child. It is an awful calamity for a child to be under the control of a too kind-hearted teacher who will show him everything.
One of the greatest artists was Charlotte Bronte. She was a wonderful little woman, and I like little women. Did you ever read Longfellow"s poem on "Little Women"? It always reminds me so much of Charlotte Bronte. One day he showed me the poem, and I asked him why he did not print it in his book, and he replied, "I don"t think it is worth while."
Since his death they have given it first rank, and I will quote one verse:
As within a little rose we find the richest dyes, As in a little grain of gold much price and value lies, And as from a little balsam much odor doth arise, So in a little woman there"s a gleam of paradise.
Charlotte Bronte was one of those wonderful, wiry, beautiful little cultivated combinations of divine femininity which no man can describe.
She had a younger brother on her hands, and when a young woman has a younger brother on her hands if she has a beau, she has her hands full.
This younger brother was dull of brains, clumsy of finger and unfitted to be an artist. But his sister was determined he should be a painter, and took him to the sh.o.r.e, to the village and the woods, and said, "Notice everything, and notice it closely." Finally, he did secure a second prize. Then his little sister threw her arms about her brother"s neck and kissed him, and thanked him for getting that prize. That is just like a woman! I never could understand a woman. Of all the mysterious things that the Lord ever put together, a woman is the most mysterious. Charlotte Bronte was like an old lady I used to know up in my native town who thanked her husband, with tears, for having brought up a flock of sheep which she herself fed every morning through the winter before he was out of bed.
Finally, Charlotte Bronte"s younger brother became dissipated and died, and then her father died, and when we ministers get to be old we might as well die. She was left without means of support. But when she told her friends, they said: "You have a college education, Charlotte. Why don"t you write something?" We now find that the first thing she wrote was "Jane Eyre," the wonderful story for which she at last received $38,000. Queen Victoria invited that humble girl to her palace at Windsor because of her marvelous genius.