Books: Lessons in Life
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Timothy Titcomb >> Lessons in Life
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We are in the habit of hearing that the children of a certain
neighborhood, or school, or town, are extraordinarily bad
children. Great wonder is sometimes expressed in regard to such
instances, when, really, they are not wonderful at all. When
children are unusually bad, parents are unusually bad, or, if they
are not bad-hearted, they are wrong-headed. I ought, perhaps, to
say here that I have known an irascible, tyrannical, unjust and
cruel school-teacher to spoil a neighborhood of children, when the
parents were without any special fault, save that of failing to
thrust him out of the charge which he had abused. But usually the
fault is at home. If the seed planted there be good, it will
produce good fruit. Yet my reader will say that the best man he
ever knew, had the worst children he ever saw. The truth of the
statement is admitted, but what do you know of the home life of
that family? How much unreasonable restraint has been exercised
upon those children? From how many exhibitions of stern and
unrelenting injustice have these children suffered? What laxity of
discipline and carelessness of culture have reigned in that
family? I know many who seem to be excellent men in society, but
who are any thing but amiable men at home. In one they are
pleasant, affable, kind, and charitable; in the other, cross-grained,
hard, unkind, and unjust. I declare with all positiveness, that when
a family or a neighborhood of children is bad, there is a reason for it
outside of the children. There are bad influences which descend
upon them, and work out their natural results in them.
It is astonishing to see how long a seed will lie in the ground
without germinating, and how true it will remain to its kind
through untold years. Cut down a pine forest, where an oak has not
been seen for a century, and oak shrubbery will spring up. Heave
out upon the surface a pile of earth that has lain hidden from the
eyes of a dozen generations, and forthwith it will grow green with
weeds. Plough up the prairie, and turn under the grass and flowers
that have grown there since the white settler can remember, and
there will spring from the inverted sod a strange growth that has
had no representative in the sunlight for long ages. Soul and soil
are alike in this. I once heard a man say of his father, who had
been dead many years--"I hate him: I hate his memory." The words
were spoken bitterly, with a flushed face and angry eyes, yet he
who spoke them was one of the kindest and most placable of men.
Deep down in his heart, under love for his mother which was almost
worship, and under affection for wife, children, and sisters which
was as deep as his nature, and under multiplied friendships, there
had been planted this seed. The father had treated the boy harshly
and unjustly; and the young soul was stung as the tender fruit is
stung by an insect. Where anger and resentment were sown, anger
and resentment were ready to spring up the moment the seed was
uncovered. I have known men to carry through life a revenge
planted in their hearts by some unjust and cruel schoolmaster. How
many men are there are in the world who have sworn to revenge
themselves upon one who had stung them with anger or injustice
when in childhood!
So we come to the grand lesson, that if we would have good
children, we must ourselves be exactly what we would have them
become; if we would govern our families, we must first govern
ourselves; if we would have only pleasant words greet our ears in
the home circle, we must speak only pleasant words. We should see
to it that we plant nothing, the legitimate fruits of which we
shall not be willing and glad to see borne in the lives of our
children. If our children are bad, the fault is, ninety-nine cases
in a hundred, our own, in some way. If we would reform society, or
make it better in any respect, our quickest way to do it is to
reform and make ourselves better. If I would reap courtesy and
hospitality and kindness and love, I must plant them; and it is
the sum of all arrogance to assume that I have a right to reap
them without planting them. A man who receives courtesy without
exercising it, reaps that which he has not sown. He is a thief,
and ought in justice to be kicked out of society. Blessings on the
man who sows the seeds of a happy nature and a noble character
broadcast wherever his feet wander,--who has a smile alike for joy
and sorrow, a tender word always for a child, a compassionate
utterance for suffering, courtesy for friends and for strangers,
encouragement for the despairing, an open heart for all--love for
all--good words for all! Such seed produces after its kind in all
soils, when it finds lodgment; and that which the sower fails to
reap, passes into hands that are grateful for the largess.
LESSON V.
TRUTH AND TRUTHFULNESS.
"For truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as
a sunbeam." MILTON.
"Odds life! must one swear to the truth of a song?" MATTHEW PRIOR.
"Get but the truth once uttered, and 'tis like
A star new-born that drops into its place,
And which, once circling in its placid round,
Not all the tumult of the earth can shake." LOWELL.
One of the rarest powers possessed by man is the power to state a
fact. It seems a very simple thing to tell the truth, but, beyond
all question, there is nothing half so easy as lying. To
comprehend a fact in its exact length, breadth, relations, and
significance, and to state it in language that shall represent it
with exact fidelity, are the work of a mind singularly gifted,
finely balanced, and thoroughly practiced in that special
department of effort. The greatness of Daniel Webster was more
apparent in his power to state a fact, or to present a truth,
than in any other characteristic of his gigantic nature. It was
the power of truth that won for him his forensic victories.
Whenever he was truest to truth, then was truth truest to him. He
was a man who implicitly believed in the power of truth to take
care of itself when it had been fairly presented; and the failures
of his life always grew out of his attempts to make falsehood look
like truth--a field of effort in which the most gifted of his
cotemporaries won the most brilliant of his triumphs.
The men are comparatively few who are in the habit of telling the
truth. We all lie, every day of our lives--almost in every
sentence we utter--not consciously and criminally, perhaps, but
really, in that our language fails to represent truth, and state
facts correctly. Our truths are half-truths, or distorted truths,
or exaggerated truths, or sophisticated truths. Much of this is
owing to carelessness, much to habit, and, more than has generally
been supposed, to mental incapacity. I have known eminent men who
had not the power to state a fact, in its whole volume and
outline, because, first, they could not comprehend it perfectly,
and, second, because their power of expression was limited. The
lenses by which they apprehended their facts were not adjusted
properly, so they saw every thing with a blur. Definite outlines,
cleanly cut edges, exact apprehension of volume and weight, nice
measurement of relations, were matters outside of their
observation and experience. They had broad minds, but bungling;
and their language was no better than their apprehensions--usually
it was worse, because language is rarely as definite as
apprehension. Men rarely do their work to suit them, because their
tools are imperfect.
There are men in all communities who are believed to be honest,
yet whose word is never taken as authority upon any subject. There
is a flaw or a warp somewhere in their perceptions, which prevents
them from receiving truthful impressions. Every thing comes to
them distorted, as natural objects are distorted by reaching the
eye through wrinkled window-glass. Some are able to apprehend a
fact and state it correctly, if it have no direct relation to
themselves; but the moment their personality, or their personal
interest, is involved, the fact assumes false proportions and
false colors. I know a physician whose patients are always
alarmingly sick when he is first called to them. As they usually
get well, I am bound to believe that he is a good physician; but I
am not bound to believe that they are all as sick at beginning as
he supposes them to be. The first violent symptoms operate upon
his imagination and excite his fears, and his opinion as to the
degree of danger attaching to the diseases of his patients is not
worth half so much as that of any sensible old nurse. In fact,
nobody thinks of taking it all; and those who know him, and who
hear his sad representations of the condition of his patients,
show equal distrust of his word and faith in his skill, by taking
it for granted that they are in a fair way to get well.
It is impossible for bigots, for men of one idea, for fanatics,
for those who set boundaries to themselves in religious, social,
and political creeds, for men who think more of their own selfish
interests than they do of truth, and for vicious men, to speak the
truth. We are all, I suppose, bigots to a greater or less extent.
We all have a creed written in our minds, or printed in our books;
and to this we are more or less blindly attached. We set down an
article of faith, or adopt an opinion, and nothing is allowed to
interfere with it. If a sturdy fact comes along, and asks
admission, we turn to our creed to see if we can safely entertain
it. If the creed says "No," we say "No," and the fact is turned
out of doors, and misrepresented after it is gone. Our creeds are
our dwellings. They come next to us, and nothing can come to us,
or go out from us, without going through our creeds. The simple
fact of the death of Jesus Christ upon the cross, reaching the
mind through various creeds, and passing out again, goes through
as many phases as there are creeds, ranging through a scale which
at one extreme presents a God dying to redeem the lost millions of
a world, and, at the other, a benevolent, sweet-tempered man,
yielding his life in testimony of the honesty of his teachings.
No new truth presents itself, which does not have to run the
gauntlet of our creeds. If it get through alive, and seem disposed
to be peaceable, and to remain subordinate to them, then we let it
live, and receive it into respectable society;--otherwise, we
entreat it shamefully. Sometimes the truth is too much for us, and
asserts its power to stand without our help, and then we
compromise with it. The world will turn on its axis, and wheel
around its orbit, though we stop the mouth of the profane wretch
who declares it; so, after a while, we get tired of fighting the
fact, and shape our creeds accordingly. We fight the sturdy truths
of geology, because they interfere with our creeds, but after
awhile the sturdy truths of geology become too sturdy for us, and
then we begin to patronize them, and to confer upon them the honor
of harmonizing with our creeds. A man who has adopted the creed of
a materialist, is entirely incompetent to receive, entertain, and
represent a spiritual fact. My creed is the window at which I sit,
and look at all the world of truth outside of me. All truth is
tinted by the medium through which it passes to reach my mind; and
such is my imperfection and my weakness, that I could not raise my
window immediately, and place my soul in direct, vital contact
with the great atmosphere of truth, if I would.
But if bigotry be such a bar to the correct perception of truth,
what shall be said of self-interest and personal vices of appetite
and passion? It is possible for no man who owns a slave and finds
profit in such ownership, to receive the truth touching the right
of man to himself, and the moral wrong of slavery. We have too
much evidence that even creeds must bend to self-interest, and
that any traffic will be regarded as morally right which is
pecuniarily profitable. Once, in the creed of the slaveholders,
slavery was admitted to be wrong, but that was when it was looked
upon as temporary in its character, and, on the whole, evil in its
results to all concerned. Now, when it is sought to be made a
permanent institution, because it seems to be the only source of
the wealth of a section, it has become right; and even the
slave-trade logically falls into the category of laudable and
legitimate commerce. It is impossible for a people who have allowed
pecuniary interest to deprave their moral sense to this extent,
to perceive and receive any sound political truth, or to apprehend
the spirit and temper of those who are opposed to them. The same
may be said of the liquor traffic. The act of selling liquor is
looked upon with horror by those who stand outside, and who have
an eye upon its consequences; but the seller deems it legitimate,
and looks upon any interference with his sales as an infringement
of his rights. Our selfish interest in any business, or in any
scheme of profit, distorts all truth either directly or indirectly
related to such business or scheme, or living in its region and
atmosphere. The President of the United States, or the governor of
the commonwealth, may be an excellent man; but if I want an
office, and he fails to appoint me to it, why I don't exactly
regard him as such. He becomes to me a very ordinary and vulgar
sort of man indeed; but if he give me my office, then, though he
may be all that his enemies think him, he seems to me to be
invested with a singular nobility of character that other people
do not apprehend at all.
The vices of humanity are sad media through which to receive
truth--often so opaque that no truth can reach the mind at all. It
is impossible for a man whose affections are bestialized, whose
practices are libertine, and whose imaginations are all impure, to
receive the truth that there are such things as purity and virtue,
and that there are men and women around him who are virtuous and
pure. There is no truth which personal vice will not distort. The
approaches to a sensual mind are through the senses, and the same
may be said of all minds in a general way; but the approaches to a
sensual mind are only through the senses, and they, being
perverted, abused, exhausted, or unduly excited, furnish the
utterly unreliable avenues by which truth reaches the soul. The
grand reason why truth, published from the pulpit and the
platform, revealed in periodicals and books, and embodied in
pictures and statues, works no greater changes upon the minds and
morals of men, is, that it never gets inside of men in the shape
in which it is uttered. It passes through such media of bigotry,
or self-interest, or vice, that its identity and power are lost.
It is not, therefore, remarkable that so little truth is told
when so little is received--that so little is expressed when so
little is apprehended. The largest field will not produce an
oat-straw that will stand alone, if there be no silica in the soil,
and the largest mind cannot express a pure truth if it has lived
always so encased that pure truth could not find its way into it.
All truth reaches our minds through various media, by which it is
more or less colored and refracted; and it is very rare that a man
has the power to embody in language and utter a truth in the
degree of perfection in which he received it. As I said at
beginning, the power to state a fact correctly, or to express a
pure truth, is among the rarest gifts of man. It never struck me
that David was remarkably hasty, when he said that all men were
liars. All men are liars, in one respect or another. They are
divisible into various classes, which may legitimately be
mentioned under two heads, viz., unconscious liars and conscious
liars.
Of those who lie, and suppose they are telling the truth, I have
already spoken. They are a large and most respectable class of
people, and their apology must be found in the theory I have
advanced; yet among these may be found men and women who will
require all the amplitude of our mantles of charity to cover them.
I have been much impressed with a passage in Dr. Bushnell's recent
volume, entitled "Christian Nurture," which incidentally touches
upon this subject, in the writer's characteristically powerful
way; and as I cannot condense it, I will copy it:
"There is, in some persons who appear in all other respects to be
Christian, a strange defect of truth, or truthfulness. They are
not conscious of it. They would take it as a cruel injustice were
they only to suspect their acquaintances of holding such an
estimate of them. And yet, there is a want of truth in every sort
of demonstration they make. It is not their words only that lie,
but their voice, air, action; their every putting forth has a
lying character. The atmosphere they live in is an atmosphere of
pretence. Their virtues are affectations. Their compassions and
sympathies are the airs they put on. Their friendship is their
mood, and nothing more; and yet they do not know it. They mean, it
may be, no fraud. They only cheat themselves so effectually as to
believe that what they are only acting is their truth. And, what
is difficult to reconcile, they have a great many Christian
sentiments; they maintain prayer as a habit, and will sometimes
speak intelligently of matters of Christian experience."
It was the oracular sage, Deacon Bedott, who, in view of the
imperfections of his kind, remarked several times in his life:
"we are all poor creeturs"--a remark that comes as near to being
pure truth as any we meet with outside of the Bible and the
standard treatises on mathematics. We are, indeed, poor creatures.
Our highest conceptions of truth are contemptible, our best
utterances fall short of our conceptions, and our lives are poorer
than our language.
Of all conscious and criminal lying, I know of none that exceeds
in malignity and magnitude that of a political campaign. In such a
struggle, men get in love with lies. They seek apologies for the
circulation of lies. They hug lies to their hearts in preference
to truth. It is the habit of hopeful philosophers to enlarge upon
the benefit to our people of the annual and quadrennial contests
for place, which occur in our country, as if principles were the
things really at stake, and personalities were out of the
question, as the lying politicians would have us believe. What, in
honesty, can be said of the leading speakers and the leading
presses which sustain a party in a contest for power, but that
they studiously misrepresent their opponents, misstate their own
motives, give currency to false accusations, suppress truth that
tells against them, exaggerate the importance of that which favors
them, seize upon all plausible pretexts for fraud, skulk behind
subterfuges, and lie outright when it is deemed necessary. And
what can be expected more and better than this, when the leaders
are office-seekers, who live and thrive on the grand basilar lie
that the motive which inspires all their action is a regard for
the popular good? Of course I speak generally. There are
politicians and presses that are above personal considerations;
but even these become infected with the prevalent poison of
falsehood that is everywhere associated with their efforts.
The social lying of the world has found multitudinous satirists,
and furnished the staple of a whole school of writers. We touch
our hats in token of respect to men whom in our hearts we despise.
We inquire tenderly for the health of persons for whom we do not
care a straw. We who cannot afford it wear expensive clothing, and
display grand equipage, and give costly entertainments, not
because we enjoy it, but because we wish to impress upon the world
the belief that we can afford it. It is our way of expressing a
lie which seems to us important to the maintenance of our social
standing. We receive with a kiss a visitor whom we wish were in
Greenland, and betray her to the next who comes in. We pretend to
ourselves and our neighbors that there is nothing which we so much
esteem as the simple friendships of life, and the straight-forward
love and hearty good will of the honest hearts around us, yet when
the rich and the titled are near, we are gladdened and flattered,
and look with supercilious contempt upon the humble friendships
which we affected to cherish supremely. In our conscience and
judgment, we appreciate the genuine values of social life, and we
profess in our language to hold them in just estimation, but in
our life and practice we honor that which is fictitious and
conventional, apprehending in our conscience and judgment that we
are acting a lie. Socially I cannot but believe that there is far
more of truthfulness in humble than in high life. The more nearly
we come down to hearty nature, and the further we go from, the
artificial and conventional, the nearer do we come to truth. Truth
is indeed at the bottom of this well, and not in the artificial
wall that rises above it, nor the buckets that go up and down as
caprice or selfishness turns the windlass.
Business lying is, after all, the most universal of any. It is
confined to no age and no nation. Solomon understood the world's
great game when he wrote: "It is naught, it is naught, saith the
buyer: but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth;" and from
Solomon's day down to ours, buyers have depreciated that which
they would purchase, and then boasted of their bargains. When two
selfish persons meet on opposite sides of a counter, there rises
between them a sort of antagonism. One is interested in selling an
article of merchandise at the highest practicable profit, and the
other is interested in obtaining it at the lowest possible price.
Of the small, cunning lies that pass back and forth over that
counter, of the half-truths told, and the whole truths suppressed,
of deceptions touching the quality of goods on one side and the
ability to buy on the other, it would be humiliating to tell. If
every lie told in the shops, across mahogany and show-case, by
buyers and sellers, were nailed like base coin to the counter,
there would be no room for the display of goods. It is considered
no mean compliment to a business man to say that he is sharp at a
bargain; yet this sharpness is rarely more than the faculty of
ingenious lying. A man who sells to me an article worth only five
dollars for twice that sum is a "sharp man;" but he cannot make
such a sale to me without telling me, in some way, a lie. The
price he puts upon his merchandise is a lie, essentially, in
itself.
There is a great deal of business lying that by long habit becomes
unconscious. If we take up a newspaper, we shall find that quite a
number of the stores around us, kept by our excellent friends,
have "the largest and finest stock of goods ever displayed in the
city." We shall find that they have been selling for years at
"unprecedentedly low prices," that they are "selling at less than
cost," that they are pushing off goods at rates "ruinously low,"
and that they can offer bargains to buyers that will confound
their competitors. I suppose that none of these advertisers think
they are lying, or, if they do, that their lying is of a harmful
character. Lying in this way is supposed to be part of the
legitimate machinery of trade. Promising definitely to finish work
without the expectation of keeping the promise, or being able to
keep it, is another kind of half unconscious lying. There are men
engaged in various trades, in all communities, whose word is of no
more value, when in the form of a promise to finish within a
certain period a certain piece of work, than the fly-leaf of a
last year's almanac. There are men whom every one knows who will
lie without blushing about their work, and who will stand at their
counter and lie all day, and then sleep with a peaceful conscience
at night, having failed to fulfil a single pledge during their
waking hours. Then there are people who will promise to pay bills,
and promise a hundred times over, and never pay, and never expect
to pay. When a bill is presented, they promise to pay, as a matter
of course; and that is considered as good as the gold, until it is
presented again; and then comes another promise, and another and
another. The creditor knows the debtor lies, but many a debtor of
this kind would feel insulted and injured by any spoken doubts of
his truthfulness.
But the field is large, and I am already beyond the limits which I
set for myself in these essays. It will be seen that I regard
truthfulness as, on the whole, a rare article in this world. It
is in some respects necessarily so. Many men are incapable of
stating a fact or telling a truth. They have not the power to
comprehend or express either. The majority of men receive truth
through such media of prejudice, selfishness, bigotry, sensuality,
and the like, that they never get it pure, and are therefore
incapable of uttering it correctly, even when their power of
expression equals their power of perception, which is not commonly
the case. So there is a world of unconscious lying; but I am sorry
to believe that there is just as large a world of conscious lying.
In politics, society, and business, the conscious and intentional
lie abounds. "Lord! how this world is given to lying!"
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