Books: Lessons in Life
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Timothy Titcomb >> Lessons in Life
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I know that there are multitudes of tender-hearted women--women of
abounding benevolence and sensitive conscience--who are troubled
upon this subject. They have a desire to do good, and to do it in
the right way; but, somehow, they find if impossible to do it
according to the views of the story-writers. They are any thing
but rugged in health, perhaps, or they have a dependent family of
young children around them, or the care of their dwellings absorbs
their time. They fail to find the opportunity to visit the poor,
or they do not feel themselves adapted to the office; and still
they carry about with them the uncomfortable suspicion that they
are meanly shrinking from duty. My thought upon this point is that
my duties never conflict with one another, and that if I can do
good in one way better than another, then that is my way to do
good. I shall not permit the story-writers to prescribe for me,
nor shall I allow them to make me uncomfortable.
There is a class of men and women in all Protestant communities
who think it a very neat thing to do good at random. They sow
broadcast of cheap seed, content to reap nothing at all, and
pleasantly disappointed if they find here and there a stalk of
corn to reward their sowing. They do not prepare their ground,
they do not cultivate it at all, but they sow, hoping that in some
open place a seed may fall and germinate. Some of these people
regard this method of doing good as a kind of holy stratagem--a
Christian trick--which takes the devil at a disadvantage. I once
knew a kind old gentleman who did a business that brought him
considerably into contact with rough and profane persons; and as
he wished to do something for them, he kept his pockets filled
with little printed cards entitled "The Swearer's Prayer;" and
whenever an oath came out, the utterer was immediately presented
with this card with a little story on it, and a statement that "to
swear is neither brave, polite, nor wise." I very well remember
hearing the old gentleman say that, though he had given away
hundreds of these cards, he had never learned that one of them had
done any good. I do not wonder at it. It was a sneaking way of
doing good, or of trying to. If the old man had remonstrated
personally with these swearing fellows, and told them that their
habit was both vulgar and wicked, does any one suppose that the
result would have been so unsatisfactory? He had not pluck enough
to do this; so he gave them a card, and they either threw it in
his face or threw it away. But then, the cards didn't cost much!
I have been much interested in watching a car-load of passengers,
while receiving each from the hands of a professional distributor
a religious tract. All have received the gift politely, in
deference to the motive which prompted, or was supposed to prompt,
its bestowal; yet I have never failed to perceive that politeness
was really taxed in the matter. Now let me be candid, and confess
that I was never pleasantly impressed by being presented with a
tract in a railroad car. This fact cannot be attributed to any
lack of disposition to contemplate religious subjects; but there
is something which tells me that it is improper and indelicate for
any man to come into a public vehicle, and thrust upon me and upon
my fellow-passengers a set of motives and opinions on religion
which may or may not accord with my own and theirs--just as it
happens. I think the natural action of the mind is to brace itself
against influences sought to be sprung upon it in this manner;
and I am yet to be convinced that this indiscriminate and
wholesale distribution of religious tracts in railroad stations
and public conveyances is not doing, and has not done, more harm
than good. I know that multitudes of men--not vicious--are
disgusted with it, and offended by it, and that there is
something--call it what you may--in the emotions excited by the
presentation of a tract under such ill-chosen circumstances, which
counteracts any good influence it was intended to produce. A
gentleman will receive a tract politely, and read it or not
according to his whim; but it will be very apt to disgust him with
the style of Christianity which it represents.
I am aware that the secretary and the agents of the tract
societies make very encouraging reports of the results of their
operations. I am always interested in these details, and do not
discredit at all the statements which they make. Nay, I am
convinced that in certain departments of their effort they are
successful in doing much good. I believe that their noble army of
colporteurs, going from lonely neighborhood to neighborhood, and
carrying with them an unselfish, devoted life, and the living
voice of prayer, exhortation, and counsel, win many souls to
Christian virtue. I am willing to acknowledge, further, that here
and there a tract, chance-sown, may fall into ground ready to
receive it; but I have a right to question whether the same
outlay of effort and money, applied directly in other fields,
would not bring very much larger returns. My point is that in all
efforts to do good, in this way, appropriateness of time and place
is always to be consulted. I once took my seat in a dentist's
chair to have an operation performed upon my teeth. If I remember
correctly, an ugly fang was to be removed,--at any rate, pain was
involved in the matter; but no sooner was the dentist's arm around
my head, and his instrument in my mouth, than the well-meaning and
zealous operator began to question me upon the subject of personal
religion. Now it seemed quite as bad to undertake to propagate
Christianity at the point of a surgical instrument, as it would be
to win proselytes by the sword; and the utter incongruity of the
two operations disgusted me. At any rate, _I changed my dentist_.
I felt like the man who found upon his landlady's table an article
of butter that was inconveniently encumbered with hair, and who
informed her that he had no objection to hair, but would prefer to
have it served upon a separate dish.
A good many years ago, I read a Sunday-school book entitled, if I
remember correctly, "Walks of Usefulness." It represented a man
going out into the street, and "pitching into" every person he met
with, upon the subject of religion, or starting a conversation and
immediately giving it a spiritual twist. I thought then that he
was a remarkably ingenious man--a wonderful story-teller, to say
the least of him. I am inclined to think now that he romanced a
little. Every operation was so neatly done, and turned out so
well, that I really suspect it was pure fiction. I have this to
say, at any rate, that if he did and said what he professed to
have done and said, under the circumstances which he described, he
owed it to the politeness of those whom he addressed that he was
not dismissed with a decided rebuff, and told to go about his
business. "A word fitly spoken, how good it is!" Ah yes! how very
good it is! Christian zeal is no excuse for bad taste, nor is
Christian effort exempt from the laws of fitness and propriety
which attach to human effort of other aims in other fields. If I
wish to reach a man's mind upon any important subject, and
circumstances do not favor me, I wait for circumstances to change,
or I pave my way to his mind by a series of carefully-adjusted
efforts. Abrupt transitions of thought and feeling, and violent
interruptions of the currents of mental life and action, are never
favorable to reflection. If I wish to cheer a man who is bowed to
the earth in grief for the loss of a companion, I will not break
in upon his mourning with a lively tune upon a fiddle. If I wish
to attract him to a religious life, I will not interrupt the flow
of his innocently social hours by some terrible threat or warning.
In truth, I know of nothing that calls for more care, or nicer
discrimination, or choicer address, than a personal attempt to
move an irreligious mind in a religious direction. The word of
gold should always have a setting of silver.
There seems to be a prevalent disposition in the religious world
to do good by indirection and stratagem. If a man can reach one
mind by scattering ten thousand tracts, the result is more
grateful than it would be if that mind were reached by direct
personal effort without any tracts; and it makes a larger and more
interesting show in the reports. This disposition is manifest in
the matter of charitable fairs. The women of a religious society
will make up a batch of little-or-nothings, freeze a few cans of
ice cream, hire a hall, and advertise a sale. We all go, and buy
things that we do not want, with a good-natured and gallant
disregard of prices, and the footings of receipts are published in
the newspapers. The charitable women feel pleasantly about it, and
think that they have done a great deal of good at a small cost,
without remembering that all the money they have made has cost
somebody the amount of the declared figures. It seems to be a
great deal pleasanter to get possession of the money in this way,
than it would be to obtain it by a general subscription. They
forget that all they have done is to obtain a subscription by a
graceful and attractive stratagem, and that the motives which they
have pocketed with the money would not stand the test of a
scrupulous analysis. The main point seems to be to get the money,
and do the good with the least possible sense of sacrifice; as a
man goes to a charitable ball, and pays two dollars for the
privilege of dancing all night, in order to give a shilling of
profits to the widow and fatherless without feeling the burden of
the charity.
Of all the means of doing good, I know of none so repulsive as
that which is purely professional. I think we do not have so much
of this in these days as our fathers had. Our pastors are more
thoroughly our companions and friends than they used to be. They
do not assume to be our dictators and censors as they did in the
earlier days of Puritanism. The idea of the regular parochial
visit is essentially changed. But I know clergymen, even now, who
visit the house of mourning professionally, and give their
professional consolation in a professional way, and depart feeling
that they have faithfully performed their professional duty. I
know clergymen who go round from house to house with their
professional inquiries, and do up any quantity of professional
work in a day. The family come in, (those who do not run away,)
and take seats around the room, and answer questions, and listen
to a prayer, and then they bid their pastor a good afternoon with
a sense of relief, and go about their business again, while he
pushes on to his next parishioner, and repeats the professional
task. It is all a dry and unfruitful formality on the part of the
families visited, and a professionally-discharged duty on the
part of the pastor, and a pitifully-ridiculous caricature of the
visit of a religious teacher to his disciples every way. What
shall be said of an interview of which the pastor's part consisted
of these words: "Very late spring--Hem!" (looking out of the
window)--"who is building that barn?--potatoes seem to be getting
along very well;" (turning to a member of the family)--"Jane, how
do you enjoy your mind?" A spiritual frame that could stand such a
transition as that, without taking a fatal cold, must be based
upon a very sound constitution, and toughened by frequent
repetition of the process.
I suppose there will always be obtuse men in the pastoral office--
men who know no way of getting into a sensitive soul except by
knocking in the door and walking in with their boots on; but all
such men are out of their place. The souls of an average people--
tied to the tasks of life, burdened by care, oppressed by
routine, and depressed in many instances by bodily weakness--need
sympathy more than counsel, and encouragement and inspiration more
than a solemn, professional catechetical probing of their
religious state. But I think, as I have already said, that the
world is improving in this matter. Our pastors are more social,
more facile, more appreciative of the fact that, in all their
personal intercourse with their people, they must win love and
give sympathy if they would do good in the line of their
profession.
So much in the vein of criticism; and if I am asked what guide a
man shall have in the matter of doing good in the world, I shall
answer: a loving, honest, and brave heart, and a mind that judges
for itself. The heart that loves its fellow-men will move its
possessor to do good; and the mind that thinks and judges for
itself will decide in what direction its efforts ought to be made.
If a man be moved to do good, he will do it, and his heart will
lead him in the right direction. Under a mistaken sense of duty,
inculcated by incompetent counsellors, men find themselves in
fields of benevolent action to which they are very poorly adapted;
and the world is full of these blunders; but an honestly-loving
heart and an ordinarily clear brain, that nobody has been allowed
to meddle with and muddle, will tell a man where he belongs and
what he ought to do. If a man have a gift for ministering to the
sick, let him do it. If he have a gift for dealing personally with
the poor, let him do that. If he have a gift for making money, and
none for properly applying his charities, let him hand his money
to those who are competent to dispense it. I do not believe that
many loving hearts, coupled with unsophisticated judgments, are
engaged in indiscriminate and random efforts to act for religious
ends upon the minds they meet with. I believe that with all such
hearts and judgments there is connected a sense of that which is
fit and proper in time, place, and circumstance, so that wherever
they strike they leave their mark. I believe that such hearts and
judgments will scorn to do that by indirection which they can do
better directly, and that if it be fit and proper for them to
offer reproof to a man, they will do it by the brave word of
mouth, and not sneak up to him and put a card or a tract into his
hand. I believe that men with such hearts and judgments would
prefer making a subscription directly to a charitable object, to
making one indirectly by paying double price for articles they do
not want. And last, I think that pastors, with such hearts and
judgments, are not at all in danger of becoming coldly professional
in their noble duties. A life in any sphere that is the expression
and outflow of an honest, earnest, loving heart, taking counsel only
of God and itself, will be certain to be a life of beneficence in
the best possible direction.
LESSON XV.
MEN OF ONE IDEA.
"Cultivate the physical exclusively, and you have an athlete
or a savage; the moral only, and you have an enthusiast or a maniac;
the intellectual only, and you have a diseased oddity--it may be a
monster. It is only by wisely training all three together that the
complete man can be formed."--SAMUEL SMILES.
When the heats of summer have dried up the streams, and cataracts
only trickle and drip, and the dams of brooks and rivers cease to
pour the arching crystal from their lips, I have always loved to
explore the forsaken water-courses. An imprisoned fish, a shell
with rainbow lining, a curiously-worn rock, a strangely-tinted
and grotesquely-fashioned stone--these are always objects of
interest. Then to sit down upon a ledge that has been planed off
by ice, and smoothed by the tenuous passage of an ocean's
palpitating volume, and watch the shrunken stream slipping around
its feet, and hear the gurgle of the faintly-going water, and
growl so drowsy with the song that it breaks at last into
surprising articulations, and talks and laughs, and shouts and
sings--ah! this, indeed, is enchantment! There are few men,
I suppose, so fortunate as to have enjoyed a country breeding,
who do not recall scenes like this,--who do not remember a
half-holiday, at least, spent in the bed of a summer stream,
and at the feet of scanty cataracts, making fierce attacks on
water snakes, watching lizards lying among the stones of an old
raceway, creeping up, hat in hand, to a gauze-winged devil's needle
that shivered on a sunny point of rock, and looked as if it might
be the ghost of a humming-bird, starting to mark the sudden flight
and hear the chattering cry of the king-fisher as he darted
through the shadows and disappeared, and noting the slim-legged
wagtail, racing backward and forward upon the border of the
stream.
Among the objects of interest very often, if not always, to be
found at the feet of dams and cataracts, are what people call
"pot-holes." They are round holes worn in the solid rock by a
single stone, kept in motion by the water. Some of them are very
large and others are small. When the stream becomes dry, there
they are, smooth as if turned out by machinery, and the hard,
round pebbles at the bottom by which the curious work was done.
Every year, as the dry season comes along, we find that the holes
have grown larger and the pebbles smaller, and that no freshet
has been found powerful enough to dislodge the pebbles and release
the rock from their attrition. Now if a man will turn from the
contemplation of one of these pot-holes, and the means by which it
is made, and seek for that result and that process in the world of
mind which most resemble them, I am sure that he will find them in
a man of one idea. In truth, these scenes that I have been
painting were all recalled to me by looking upon one of these men,
studying his character, and watching the effect of the single idea
by which he was actuated. "There," said I, involuntarily, "is a
moral pot-hole with a pebble in it; and the hole grows larger and
the pebble smaller every year."
I suppose it is useless to undertake to reform men of one idea.
The real trouble is that the pebble is in them; and whole freshets
of truth are poured upon them, only with the effect to make it
more lively in its grinding, and more certain in its process of
wearing out itself and them. The little man who, when ordered by
his physician to take a quart of medicine, informed him with a
deprecatory whimper, that he did not hold but a pint, illustrates
the capacity of many of those who are subjects of a single idea.
They do not hold but one, and it would be useless to prescribe a
larger number. In a country like ours, in which every thing is new
and everybody is free, there are multitudes of self-constituted
doctors, each of whom has a nostrum for curing all physical and
moral disorders and diseases,--a patent process by which humanity
may achieve its proudest progress and its everlasting happiness.
The country is full of hobby-riders, booted and spurred, who
imagine they are leading a grand race to a golden goal, forgetful
of the truth that their steeds are tethered to a single idea,
around which they are revolving only to tread down the grass and
wind themselves up, where they may stand at last amid the world's
ridicule, and starve to death.
Man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds
out of the mouth of God, whether spoken through nature or
revelation. There is no one idea in all God's universe so great
and so nutritious that it can furnish food for an immortal soul.
Variety of nutriment is absolutely essential, even to physical
health. There are so many elements that enter into the structure
of the human body, and such variety of stimuli requisite for the
play of its vital forces, that it is necessary to lay under
tribute a wide range of nature; and fruits and roots and grain,
beasts of the field, fowls of the air, and fish of the sea, juices
and spices and flavors, all bring their contributions to the
perfection of the human animal, and the harmony of its functions.
The sailor, kept too long upon his hard biscuit and salt junk,
degenerates into scurvy. The occupant of the Irish hovel who
lives upon his favorite root, and sees neither bread nor meat,
grows up with weak eyes, an ugly face, and a stunted body. It is
precisely thus with a man who occupies and feeds his mind with a
single idea. He grows mean and small and diseased with the diet.
The soul bears relation to such a wealth of truth, such a
multitude of interests cluster about it, it has such variety of
elements--as illustrated by its illimitable range of action and
passion--it touches and receives impressions from all other souls
at such an infinite variety of points, that it is simply absurd to
suppose that one idea can feed it, even for a day.
A mind that surrenders itself to a single idea becomes essentially
insane. I know a man who has dwelt so long upon the subject of a
vegetable diet that it has finally taken possession of him. It is
now of such importance in his eyes that every other subject is
thrown out of its legitimate relations to him. It is the constant
theme of his thought--the study of his life. He questions the
properties and quantities of every mouthful that passes his lips,
and watches its effects upon him. He reads upon this subject
everything he can lay his hands on. He talks upon it with every
man he meets. He has ransacked the whole Bible for support to his
theories; and the man really believes that the eternal salvation
of the human race hinges upon a change of diet. It has become a
standard by which to decide the validity of all other truth. If
he did not believe that the Bible was on his side of the question,
he would discard the Bible. Experiments or opinions that make
against his faith are either contemptuously rejected or
ingeniously explained away. Now this man's mind is not only
reduced to the size of his idea, and assimilated to its character,
but it has lost its soundness. His reason is disordered. His
judgment is perverted--depraved. He sees things in unjust and
illegitimate relations. The subject that absorbs him has grown out
of proper proportions, and all other subjects have shrunk away
from it. I know another man--a man of fine powers--who is just as
much absorbed by the subject of ventilation; and though both of
these men are regarded by the community as of sound mind, I think
they are demonstrably insane.
If we rise into larger fields, we shall find more notable
demonstration of the starving effect of the entertainment of a
single idea. Scattered throughout the country we shall find men
who have devoted themselves to the cause of temperance, or
abstinence from intoxicating liquors. Here is a grand, a humane, a
most worthy and important cause; yet temperance as an idea is not
enough to furnish food for a human soul. Some of these men have
only room in them for one idea, and, so far as they are concerned,
it might as well be temperance as any thing, though it is bad for
the cause; but the majority of them were, at starting, men of
generous instincts, a quick sense of that which is pure and true,
and a genuine love of mankind. They dwelt upon their idea--they
lived upon it for a few years--and then they "showed their
keeping." If I should wish to find a narrow-minded, uncharitable,
bigoted soul, in the smallest possible space of time, I would look
among those who have made temperance the specialty of their
lives--not because temperance is bad, but because one idea is bad;
and the men afflicted by this particular idea are numerous and
notorious. They have no faith in any man who does not believe
exactly as they do. They accuse every man of unworthy motives who
opposes them. They permit no liberty of individual judgment and no
range of opinion; and when they get a chance, they drive
legislation into the most absurd and harmful extremes. Men of one
idea are always extremists, and extremists are always nuisances. I
might truthfully add that an extremist is never a man of sound
mind.
The whole tribe of professional agitators and miscalled reformers
are men of one idea. That these men do good, sometimes directly
and frequently indirectly, I do not deny; and it is equally
evident that they do a great deal of harm, the worst of which,
perhaps, falls upon themselves. Like the charge of a cannon, they
do damage to an enemy's fortifications, but they burn up the
powder there is in them, and lose the ball. Like blind old Samson,
they may prostrate the pillars of a great wrong, but they crush
themselves and the Philistines together. The greatest and truest
reformer that ever lived was Jesus Christ; but ah! the difference
between his broad aims, universal sympathies, and overflowing
love, and the malignant spirit that moves those who angrily beat
themselves to death against an instituted wrong! As an illustration,
look at those who have been the prominent agitators of the slavery
question in this country for the last twenty years. Are they men of
charity? Are they Christian men? Is not invective the chosen and
accustomed language of their lips? Do they not follow those against
whom they have opposed themselves, whether for good cause or
otherwise, into their graves with a fiendish lust of cruelty, and do
they not delight to trample upon great names and sacred memories?
Are they men whom we love? Do we feel attracted to their society?
Teachers of toleration, are they not the most intolerant of all men
living? Denouncers of bigotry, are they not the most fiercely bigoted
of any men we know? Preachers of love and good will to men, do
they not use more forcibly than any other class the power of words
to wound and poison human sensibilities?
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