It is deeply impressive, the way in which one man, born not above myriads of his fellows, begins to rise until by and by he stands head and shoulders above his generation! What is the inner vitality which presses him upward? What is this hidden difference in men by which one remains in the by-eddies of life, and another sweeps out on the crest of the rising tide of history?
Much of it is in the man himself. To be kingly is inborn. There is the nature that refuses to be shut up to the petty, that will not content itself with one street or town, that steps out into life from childhood with the step of the conqueror, and walks among us; one who was born a king. To be a king, one must have the powers of organization, combination, discipline, direction, statesmanship. These qualities enlarge as one pa.s.ses from the particular to the general, from the personal to the range of natural forces, emergencies, and wide pursuits.
Dominion is an inherent right of the soul. In all our hearts, did we but listen and understand, there are adumbrations of kingly ancestors, and the latent stirrings of kingly powers.
Which of us would want to be born at all, if we should be told in advance, You shall never control anything? You shall never have the slightest chance of self-a.s.sertion, of impressing your own individuality upon the world? One might as well be born without hands or feet!
Kingship involves ascendancy and authority. Both are truly gained, not by chicanery, but by personal force. There is a natural gift of leadership, which is strengthened by endurance, perseverance, and ceaseless hard work.
Kingship also involves a larger vision. One man looks at his shoe-strings; another man looks at the stars. The first step toward rule is to find a point of view from which one can look widely out over the race. This is the primary value of education: it is not that books are important, but that men are--the men who have swayed history--and books tell of such men. Not the library is inspirational, but the life-spirit of mankind, bound up in even dusty papyrus-rolls, or set on clay-tablets of four thousand years ago. He who would serve his times politically must first understand, so far as may be, all times.
Another basis of supremacy is conviction. Leadership belongs to those who believe. The man who has a definite policy to propose, and a definite way of working for it, soon outstrips the man who is just looking about.
Kingship involves an iron will. An iron will does not imply necessarily ugliness of temper, obstinacy, or pig-headedness. It is simply a straight-forward, dauntless, and invincible way of doing things. What I say, you must do, is back of all successful leadership, whether in the home or in the world-arena. The man who is master of the obedience of his child, or of his fellows, is master of their fate. We are all at the mercy of the strong-willed.
Growth is development in right a.s.sertion; it is the a.s.sumption of legitimate responsibility and command. To be lowly of heart does not mean to be inefficient; to be humble does not necessarily mean to be obscure. Luther and Lincoln were both of a childlike humility of heart.
What Christianity has not emphasized in the past, but what it must now begin to emphasize, is the reality of dominion--its value, and its relation to the kingdom of G.o.d. For centuries, religion has too often been thought of, too often spoken of, as if it were the last resource of the heart, A brilliant young professor of psychology not long ago referred to religion as something to flee to, by those who were disappointed in love! We have spoken so much of "giving up," that the Christian life has wrongly seemed to mean the giving-up of one"s individuality, interests, powers. As well might we expert the deep sea to give up its rolling tides, or the air to give up its four winds, as to expect the heart of man to part with its human hopes!
This is not a right interpretation of life. When Nature plants an oak in the forest, she does not say, Be a lichen, an _Eozoon canadense_, a small ground-creeping thing! She says, Grow! Become a tall, strong, mountain tree! When we hold our baby in our arms, we do not say, My child, be good for nothing! Neither does G.o.d say, Be nothing, do nothing! Just exist as humbly and meekly as you can! He says, "Quit you like men!"
Each of us is born for a sceptre and a crown. It gives a strange new thrill to life, to realize that we may be just as ambitious as we please, that we may long earnestly for high things, and work for them, if our inmost desire is not for self but for G.o.d. This new idea of ambition should be at the root of education and of religious teaching.
Piety is not a namby-pamby sentiment; it is a great intellectual force.
Desire is architectural: our dreams should be of prestige and power.
True ambition is the reaching-out of the soul toward preordained things. What else is the meaning of our love for excellence, our insatiable yearning for perfection? "What is excellent," says Emerson, "is permanent." To excel in any work is to combine in that work the most enduring qualities of human labor; to excel in any place is to shine forth with the great qualities of the race. Hence, ambition has a rightful place.
The power of a king is the power of control. All about us are moving the great forces of the universe--physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual.
What we can do with them is a test of our power. Life is in many ways a majestic trial of one"s power to command.
Three men buy adjoining tracts of land. One man mines coal upon his acres. He ama.s.ses wealth and influence because he is in control of the Carboniferous age and the human need of light and heat. The second man tills his ground and raises wheat and corn. He is in command of living nature--of the rotation of seasons, of wind, frost, rain; he uses them to provide food for those that hunger and must be fed. The third man lies under the trees. He digs no mine. He plants and reaps no corn and grain. He simply lies under the trees, gazes into the sky and dreams.
Men call him idle, but he is not so. One day he writes a book. It lives a thousand years. His control is over the spirit of man. He has entered into its hopes and sorrows, its aspirations and its dreams.
This story is a Parable of Kings. Such is the power of control that is granted to each new soul. Each child is bequeathed at birth a sceptre and a crown.
The first rule is parental. The primitive monarchy is in the home. A young baby cries. The trained nurse turns on the light, lifts the baby, hushes it, sings to it, rocks it, and stills its weeping by caresses and song. When next the baby is put down to sleep, more cries, more soothing and disturbance, and the setting of a tiny instinct which shall some day be will--the power of control.
The grandmother arrives on the scene. When baby cries, she plants the little one firmly in its crib, turns down the light, pats and soothes the tiny restless hands that fight the air, watches, waits. From the crib come whimpers, angry cries, yells, sobs, baby snarls and sniffles that die away in a sleepy infant growl. Silence, sleep, repose, and the building of life and nerve and muscle in the quiet and the darkness. The baby has been put in harmony with the laws of nature--the invigoration of fresh air, sleep, stillness--and the little one wakens and grows like a fresh, sweet rose. The mother, looking on, learns of the ways of G.o.d with men.
Firmness is the true gentleness. There is a form of authority which must be as implacable as the divine decree. Mercy is the requiring of obedience to law; it is not a cajoling training in law-defiance, which shall one day break the mother"s heart and upset the social relations of the world.
The next rule is personal: the direction of one"s own energy in the way of one"s own will. The child moves his hands, his feet; he turns his rattle up and down, and shakes it about. He discovers that he can pull things toward him and push them away; that he can reach things that are higher than his head. He begins to creep. He touches things that are the other side of the world from him, that is, across the room. He plucks fibres from the rug or carpet; swallows straws, b.u.t.tons, and little strings. He pounds, and sets up vibrations of pleasant noise; he clashes ten-pins, he blows his whistle, squeezes his rubber horse and man, rattles the newspaper, flings about his bottle and his blocks. He feels himself a self-directing power, and at times a.s.serts this power against the will of those who would make him do what he does not want to do. The love of rule is in him, and he lays his little hands on power.
Education determines whether this power shall be for good or for evil.
We cannot take away power from any child--he shall move the affairs of nations--but we can direct this love of power, or crush it; strengthen it, or weaken it; turn it toward the highest help of man, or deflect it to tyranny, cruelty, and crime.
Child-training is guidance in the way of G.o.d"s decrees. It is not the setting of one"s own ideas upon a little child; it is not the gratification of one"s own love of power; it is not the satisfaction of one"s own self-conceit. It is a firm, humble striving to carry on the harmony of the universe: to bring up the child to love order, justice, mercy, and truth.
Education is the teaching of how to direct energy for the universal good. It lays hold of a child and, out of his destructive instincts--the instinct to bang, and pull, and tear to pieces--it develops creative power, the inventive genius that lies hid within him. It takes the pure love of noise, and trains it to pitches, harmonies, intervals, and makes a musician of the boy who used to whack his spoon. It takes the alphabet and the early pothooks, and the boy by and by combines them into literature. The apples and the peaches which he is taught to exchange justly are by and by trans.m.u.ted into trade and commerce. He brings cargoes from Cuba and Ceylon, trades with j.a.pan and Hawaii, and the Asiatic isles. The energy of block-building is developed into sculpture, architecture, and civil engineering. The stamping of his foot in anger is directed to determination, perseverance, the rule of the brave spirit, the unconquerable will. Nothing is more marvellous than this grave upbuilding.
The next rule is social: the direction of personal energy that shall leave a distinct impress on other lives. It is long before we realize that for each exertion we are responsible; that what we do is held against us in strict account, not only by fate, which builds our destiny for us out of our own deeds, but by every other person with whom we come in contact. Our fellows check off daily against us so much vitality, so much magnanimity, so much idleness, cruelty, spite, goodness, selfishness, meanness, or loving-kindness. Life holds a record of our every deed, and from no least responsibility can we make our escape. We are the prisoners of events which we ourselves have brought about.
The discipline of ethics, of home-training, of the Church, and of religious teaching is addressed fundamentally to this social consciousness of ours, this responsibility which we cannot evade. To bear rule aright is to go forth into the world to build up, in authority, talent, and influence, the kingdom of G.o.d.
1. There is the agricultural phase of social rule. A man tills a farm.
It has upon it trees, streams, woodland, and meadow-land. He may rule--to what end? If he rules it for his own personal ends--merely to fill his granaries, and lay up gold--he rules it for miserliness, with a sort of thrift that is as pa.s.sing in inheritance as the flying April rain.
Or he may say: I will keep my land in trust for G.o.d. I will hold rain and frost, heat and cold, storm and sun, in fee simple for the race. My grain shall pa.s.s out into the world"s mart, sent forth with love and prayer. Such a farmer is the incarnation of moral grandeur. Let men laugh, if they will, at his overalls and plough, his wide-brimmed hat, his simple manners, and his homely, racy speech. His feet are by the furrow, but his heart is in heaven, and his treasure is there also. Says the author of _Nine Acres on the Hillside_, "The agriculturist walks side by side with the Creator."
There is a fine integrity which lies in land. There is a resolution which is concerned with crops. There is a wisdom born of wind and weather. There is a power which comes from the constant revival of life in seed and fruit and flower. This man is King of G.o.d"s Acres. Let him not despise his kingdom, and may the succession not depart from his house!
2. There is a rule which is industrial. A man is sent into the world to wield a hammer, a saw, and run an engine. If his rule over his hammer is weak, if he does not know how to use it well, if its blow is uncertain and its result unskilled, then he pa.s.ses from the line of kings, and is subject, instead of in authority, in his own domain. He is captive to a piece of steel or wood. So with every tool of trade. Each man who conquers his tool is a ruler--is in control of elements of human happiness and good. The roof-mender, the furnace-builder, the cloth-weaver, the yarn-spinner, the steel-worker, the miller--do not these all keep the race warmed, and clad, and fed?
3. The next rule is commercial. Trade itself is neither menial nor demeaning. Rightly used, it is a high form of control. People have things to buy and things to sell. The maker is handicapped. He cannot travel elsewhere to dispose of what he has. The buyer is ignorant. He does not know where to go, or cannot go, at first-hand, for the shoes, the hat, the reaper, the bricks, the lumber, the stationery which he must use. There appears upon the scene the man of observation, of investigation, of capital, of shrewdness, of resources. With one hand he gathers the products of the Pacific and of the South Seas. With the other, he takes the output of the Atlantic seaboard, the Gulf States, the Mississippi valley, the northern lakes and hills. He sets up an establishment, he puts forth runners, advertis.e.m.e.nts, and show-windows.
He stocks shelves, decks counters, and employs clerks, packers, salesmen, cash-boys, buyers, and department heads. The man who wants to buy, buys from a man across the sea and yet is served in his own town.
The man of commercial power is a man of world-wide rule. He may lay up in banks a fortune which he intends to try to spend upon himself; or he may say: I am accountable for the pocket-books of the world. I am in authority over them. I open a market, or close it. I buy, dispense, and disperse human labor. I create wants, and I satisfy them. I will establish honest laws of trade. What I do shall be rated as commercial law. What I say shall be quoted as a way of equity and probity. That man is a King of Trade. His throne is set upon hills and seas. His subjects are all men with needs, and all men with products of the land, the coasts, the sea, or brain, or skill. This is the lawful King of Trade.
He represents G.o.d"s mart of exchange. Primarily, goods are not bought and sold in the market. They are first transferred in that man"s brain.
4. Another rule is of concerted works: the rule of the Engineer. Back of every advance in our country, in facilities of trade and transportation, or of public health and safety, stands the man who thought it out. Take, for instance, the development of the "Great American Desert." Who projected its irrigation, by which areas have been redeemed from barrenness and waste? Who planned the economic use of the Niagara Falls?
Who built the Brooklyn Bridge? Who projected the vast waterway from Chicago to the Gulf? Who first thought of a cable across the depths of seas? Who bridged the Firth of Forth, the Ganges, the Mississippi? Who projected the gray docks of Montreal? the Simplon Tunnel? Who wound the iron rails across the Alleghanies, the Rockies, the Sierras? Who drew the wall that has encircled China for a thousand years? Who projected the Suez Ca.n.a.l? the Trans-Siberian Railway? Who sunk the mines of Eldorado? Who designed the Esplanade at Hamburg? the stone banks of the Seine? the waterways of Venice? the aqueducts of Rome? the Appian Way?
the military roads of Chili and Peru? the Subway in New York?
Gravity, stress, strain, weight, tension, sag, cohesion,--a few mathematical formulas, and a knowledge of the primary laws of physics,--upon such principles as these, the world is rapidly changing form and use.
The Engineer, in a strange and subtle way, stands near to G.o.d. His work is done hand-in-hand with G.o.d. He takes the forces of nature and the laws of the material world, and bends them to the needs and use of man.
Sky and sea or desert may be about him. He knows the arctic cold, the tropic heat; the forest and the plain; the mountain and the marsh; the brook and river; the peak and the precipice; the glacier and the tempest in their course. Out of the very elements he is daily building new paths for man to tread. Soon he, too, must pa.s.s; laid after death, it may be, beside some mighty water that his handiwork has spanned.
In loneliness and silence does he not often think, I wonder, of the G.o.d with whom he deals? It is G.o.d who provides the river and the sea; G.o.d who through endless ages has piled stone on stone, crust on crust, and has crumpled the strata of the earth as tissue in His hand. It is G.o.d who has bound every mote to the earth-centre; who has sent magnetic currents coursing through the globe, and has made tides and sea-changes, and the trade-winds to blow. It is the G.o.d of the Gulf Stream, the Caribbean Sea, the G.o.d of the Appalachians, the G.o.d of the Himalayas, the G.o.d of the Cordilleras, of the Amazon, the Yukon, the Yang-tse-Kiang with which he really deals.
The endless ages pa.s.s and go, but G.o.d abides. Little, daring man lifts here and there a hand to mould the world which G.o.d has made--p.r.i.c.ks the earth for gold or silver, iron or coal--but G.o.d is everywhere immanent and shines through every hour of change. Hence the March of Engineers is the march of men whom G.o.d has trained; in a special sense His master-workmen, craftsmen whom He loves. It is theirs to say, We are the Kings of Works: the Master-builders of the Most High!
5. There are Kings of Academic Thought, men who lead in professions and in collegiate careers. The wise man is the true aristocrat. His court may not be in a palace, but within its precincts are received and entertained the leaders of the race. To be provost, to be college president or university professor, is to be seated on an intellectual throne.
The problem of academic rule is not to attract a large number of students, to put up imposing buildings, to have endowments, and fill chairs with learned specialists; to grant many degrees, and to keep the hum of a teaching staff and of a student body alive in the ears of a community, marking the college group by flags and colors, cap and gown, processions and occasions. These things are right, but are mainly accessory. We have not all of a university when we have men and buildings, money, students, brains. Back of a university there lies its foundation-idea, that of academic control.
What is academic rule? It is rule over the pride of man. A college is a place whose chief power is to inculcate humility by the means of true learning; to establish intellectual honor and integrity by searching out the ways of G.o.d in nature, science, and philosophy, and in letters and in art.
It is the primary work of a university to make men humble. The Freshman is not teachable. The Soph.o.m.ore is an intellectual upstart. But by the time a man has been beaten and conquered by the great ideals of the world, which have pierced his bones and humbled his conceit--by the time the race-pa.s.sions and the race-sorrows have crept across his spirit, by the time that he has been confronted with the achievements of Homer, Empedocles, Hippocrates, Michelangelo, Socrates, Buddha, Plato, Emerson, Gladstone, Bismarck, Lincoln, and Carlyle--his self-exaltation drops from him like a garment. He--who knows how to construe a few pages of the cla.s.sics, who knows how to demonstrate a few mathematical problems, scan a few verses, recite a few odes, carry on a few scientific experiments, undertake a small research--how shall he compete with these rulers of the thought of men?
Then it is that the real rule of a university--its spirit of humility, and of reverence for antiquity--begins. The true university man, born and bred in the century, not in the years, in the race halls, not those alone in his Alma Mater, is neither a scoffer nor an atheist, nor a critic, sceptic, or cynic. He is a man of simple and exalted faith. G.o.d, who hath brought such great things to pa.s.s in science, nature, and art, in human character, in the destiny of nations, and the history of humble men and women, is a G.o.d before whom there must be awe and reverence, and not a flippant scouting of the ancient ideals. Man, who is so tried by temptation and scourging of the spirit, is a creature to be loved, appreciated, understood; not a being to whom shall be shown arrogance, aloofness, and pride. The university that makes sn.o.bs of its graduates has not yet entered into its kingdom of control.
A university also holds rule over truth. Absolute truth is in G.o.d"s hand. But the university has cla.s.s-rooms and libraries, apparatus and laboratories, which are intended for the discovery and furtherance of truth. The university is not a place to cry out for big salaries. The salaries should be living salaries. The seeker after truth should not be left without enough money for heat and shelter, for bread and meat, rest and summer-change; for the coming of children and their education. But truth may lodge without shame in an humble dwelling and may be greatly furthered without an elaborate bill of fare.
The university men of the times are the establishers of a kind of righteousness that is not always found in books. Their individual value, as they go out into the world, is to set right values on social customs and decrees; to establish the law of freedom in the home; to lead men and women out of the thraldom of ignorance, vulgarity, hearsay, and "style," into simplicity of living and a sane scale of household expense. The university leader of the future is the man who shall set laws over household accounts and who shall rule over such simple things as what best to eat and buy. He shall be an economist of the larger sort, providing for the spiritual necessities of men and their moral conduct, rather than for their b.a.l.l.s, card-parties, and social side-shows, including church entertainments and philanthropic dances and bazaars. He shall pave the way to a larger view of wealth, influence, and reform; endue man with a keener sense of his own responsibilities, make him a creature of larger desires and of more aspiring wants.
In particular, he shall pa.s.s down from generation to generation the high and n.o.ble learning of the past; he shall keep alive the flower of courtesy and charity; he shall tell the dreams of past sages, and interpret them; he shall review the thronging nations; and he shall so imbue the mind with a love of truth, of ideals, of excellence, of honor, that a new race shall go out into a larger and a n.o.bler world. And then a better day shall dawn for men.
6. The Kings of State. Says Milton, in his sonnet on Cromwell: