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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #60826 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60826)
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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of How to Face Life, by Stephen Samuel Wise
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-Title: How to Face Life
-
-Author: Stephen Samuel Wise
-
-Editor: Edward Howard Griggs
-
-Release Date: December 1, 2019 [EBook #60826]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
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-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOW TO FACE LIFE ***
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- How to Face Life
-
-
-
-
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-
- THE ART OF LIFE SERIES
- Edward Howard Griggs, Editor
-
- ---------------------
-
-
- How to Face Life
-
- BY
-
- STEPHEN S. WISE
- Rabbi of the Free Synagogue, New York
-
- [Illustration: B. W. H. logo]
-
- NEW YORK
- B. W. HUEBSCH
- MCMXVII
-
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-
-
-
-
- COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
- B. W. HUEBSCH
-
-
-
-
- PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- TO
- MY LOUTINJIM
-
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-
-
-
-
- CONTENTS
-
-
- I YOUTH
-
- PREPARING FOR LIFE
-
- PAGE 9
-
-
- II MATURITY
-
- HOW TO SERVE AND ACHIEVE
-
- PAGE 48
-
-
- III AGE
-
- HOW NOT TO GROW OLD
-
- PAGE 62
-
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-
-
-
-
- I
-
- YOUTH: PREPARING FOR LIFE
-
-
- “How beautiful is youth! How bright it gleams.
- With its illusions, aspirations, dreams!
- Book of Beginnings, Story without End,
- Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!
- Aladdin’s Lamp, and Fortunatus’ Purse!
- That holds the treasures of the universe!
- All possibilities are in its hands,
- No danger daunts it and no foe withstands;
- In its sublime audacity of faith,
- ‘Be thou removed,’ it to the mountain saith,
- And with ambitious feet, secure and proud,
- Ascends the ladder leaning on the cloud.”
-
- —LONGFELLOW: _Morituri Salutamus_.
-
-How to face life, how to prepare for life, are questions that must be
-answered by those who believe, as Lecky put it, that the “map of life”
-must be marked out, that in the words of Emerson there is such a thing
-as the “conduct of life” which man is free to determine.
-
-We are assured incessantly in these days that we must enter upon a great
-programme of preparedness for war,—back of which urging lies the
-assumption that a maximum of preparedness must be arranged in order to
-secure our land against the menace of aggression or invasion. If a
-programme of preparedness, which in the last analysis involves
-destruction and desolation, be impossible without the fullest planning,
-how much less possible is it to shape a constructive life-upbuilding
-programme without most careful and adequate preparedness.
-
-Into the mind of youth must penetrate the ideal of
-self-preparedness,—not of external preparation for the outward life, but
-of inmost preparedness for the inner life. Whether or not the
-preparedness programme be, as some hold, more menacing to the soul of
-America than foreign foe can ever become because it marks an immediate
-invasion of the American soul rather than a possible aggression upon
-American soil, it is certain that life cannot worthily be lived save
-after preparedness in the fullest sense of the term.
-
-It is, in truth, easy to stir up excitement and even deeper feeling over
-a purely external problem such as is that of war-preparedness, preparing
-to do something to another whether an individual or a nation or a
-continent. The easiest way is the way of external preparedness, the
-militaristic way, for it involves a minimum of reasoning. But
-preparation for life which I ask of youth involves the largest measure
-of reasoning and planning and purposing. It is the hardest way rather
-than the easiest way, though the pursuit thereof makes ultimately for
-the way that is inevitably rightful and unerring.
-
-Is it needful to urge upon young people that they shall face life with
-the determination to sketch for themselves a map of life as they see it,
-as they purpose, if so be they purpose, to make it? What would be said
-of a military commander who entered upon a land to him unknown without
-securing in advance the fullest possible data, without gaining, as far
-as it was possible so to do, an understanding of the outlines of the
-country he proposed to enter?
-
-Curiously enough, it is often imagined that preparation for life is
-largely a matter of the higher education and exclusively associated with
-college and university life. This imagining may be due to the
-circumstance that men and women step out of so-called preparatory
-schools into higher institutions of learning. One sometimes wonders, in
-very truth, whether, instead of college preparing men for life, it were
-not more fitting to hold that after the college or university experience
-men need to be repaired if they are rightly to live and toil and serve.
-
-My counsel is not for men alone but for men and women, for youth and
-maidens alike. Let no man venture to offer two kinds of counsel, one to
-men and yet another to women. There is only one manner of preparedness
-for life, for life is life and it is not one thing for a man and yet
-another for a woman.
-
-Though I have used the term “map of life,” map is hardly a happy
-analogy. For maps presuppose that a land is become known and familiar.
-And life cannot be foreknown and charted, if life it is to be, as every
-life ought to be, a great adventure into the unknown rather than the
-acceptance of a programme, a hazard of the spirit rather than a body of
-prescriptions and ordinances. We are to fare forth upon the seas of
-life,—without chart. But some of us attempt to sail the sea rudderless,
-helmless, starless. Men and women embark upon life without ever having
-given thought to the storms that beset, to the rocks that threaten, to
-the unknown perils that may lie before. And then it is wondered why many
-fail to make port, why the ships of life frequently founder upon the
-high seas. The wonder ought rather to be that so many enter triumphantly
-into the harbors of eternity, seeing how rarely men map out life in
-advance, seeing how grudging is the time spent upon preparation, seeing
-how seldom men diligently and consciously prepare to meet those
-difficulties and burdens and problems which adequate preparedness for
-life alone can fit the soul to face.
-
-Let not life be mapped out so definitely for you, so accurately and
-systematically that no room will be left for the play of your own will
-and the determinations of your own spirit. I would almost rather have
-every map of life flung away than have life so mapped out as to leave
-youth no freedom of choice, as to fail to spur men on to face the great
-adventure, to be capable of daring to front whatsoever life may offer.
-Not very long ago, I inquired of friends, whose little lad is a pupil of
-one of the so-called best schools in the land, when they had applied for
-his admittance, and they answered, “Before he was born.” It occurred to
-me to inquire what dire thing would have happened in the event of the
-lad having proved upon birth to be a little lass, but the comforting
-assurance was at once given me that such contingency, not to say
-calamity, had been guarded against, in a sense, through applying for
-admittance to a girls’ school in the event of the lad being born a lass.
-It seemed to me then as it does now an admirable thing to make such
-comprehensive provision for a child’s education as to gain for it in
-advance of birth admittance into two schools, irrespective of sex.
-
-But, without resting too heavily upon this illustration, is it not
-possible to prepare another for life so definitely as to deny to youth
-the privilege of willing, choosing, venturing, daring—even losing? It
-were almost better that a youth go without the problematic advantages of
-school discipline than have his school and college and university career
-chosen and marked out for him rigidly and inflexibly. What greater wrong
-can I do my child than to withhold from him the freedom of choice, than
-so to cabin and confine his spirit that he must needs beat his wings in
-the intense inane without knowing the atmosphere that magnifies freedom
-and liberates the soul? Guide if you will the life of youth, but beware
-of the danger of maiming and crippling life through so definitely and
-completely mapping it out as to deny the soul of youth the peril of
-adventure, the joy of combat, the glory of hopeless daring.
-
-Life must mean pioneering, not making one’s way, but breaking a way,
-clearing a path of life for one’s self. It is the glory of life,—and
-there is no glory like unto it,—to face the task of moral and
-intellectual pioneering. There is danger lest in our time there pass out
-of the life of men one of the most precious of things, that pioneering
-spirit that comes to the man who after he has fared forth, braved every
-danger, stood every peril at bay, declares in the word of the poet:
-
- “Anybody might have heard it
- But God’s whisper came to me.”
-
-The whisper of God comes to every man or to every man it may come. The
-opportunity for the performance of the task of moral or spiritual
-pioneering is denied to no man. Americas of the spirit remain to be
-discovered within the life of every one of us. What man or woman who may
-read this will affirm that there has never come into his life a
-revelation the gleam of which enables him to see that he is free to
-reach a great decision, that his spirit may dare a great refusal, that
-his soul may utter a great affirmation? The great moment of life is that
-in which a man is revealed unto himself, in which his soul is laid bare,
-in which it comes to him with the force of a revelation,—mine is the
-power to will and to determine the content of my life, though if I am to
-will I must dare to be myself, I must reach the decision, I must will, I
-must be free.
-
-And the freedom of youth means freedom to be one’s self, to be a law
-unto one’s self, not to be one’s self in lawlessness. Choose ye this day
-whom ye will serve,—remembering that the responsibility of decision
-rests with you and that, in the despite of all the lives that have been
-lived and all the maps that have been drawn and all the plans that have
-been sketched and all the precedents that have been set, you must live
-your own life, and, if it be not your own life, it is not life at all.
-Cherish the counsels of loved ones but remember that neither mother nor
-father, uncle nor cousin nor any kinsman or kinswoman whosoever can
-choose whom you are to serve. You cannot serve God unless yours be the
-choice.
-
-Young men and women require to be warned against a thousand and one
-influences ever lurking near at hand to deter youth from the hazard of
-the spirit’s pioneering. Despise the counsels of the over-wise and
-over-mature, the sum of whose low wisdom is that a man can make no
-graver mistake in life than to wander from the paths which all men else
-have pursued. The fear of seeming unusual obsesses the soul of too many
-of us. Not a few men and women would rather be wrong than seem
-different. Difference, variance, distinctiveness are not ends in
-themselves, but may become and ofttimes are the means that must be used
-by him who is not fearful of moral distinction.
-
-Outward differentiation is nothing, but inward distinction is
-everything,—is the counsel I ever urge upon my fellow-Jews. We are not
-to seem different for the sake of seeming, but we are to dare to seem to
-be different in order to be distinguished, in order to achieve spiritual
-outstandingness. When nice and refined and timid people say to you,
-“Remember to be like everybody else, don’t attempt anything new, don’t
-run the risk of seeming peculiar, don’t dream of venturing upon novel
-courses whether in things great or small,” remember that there is a
-possible invasion of the soul’s integrity that no man need endure. To
-the counsels of the timorous fling back the command to the brave:
-“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
-
-When men seek to affright you by their counsels of prudence, remind them
-of the rule of one of the knightliest of Americans, the founder of
-Hampton Institute, who laid upon one youth’s soul the burden: “doing
-what can’t be done is the glory of living.” And when men seek to degrade
-you to the level of their own base timidity, bid them to remember the
-courage and nobleness that were in the act of Higginson in leading a
-negro regiment touching which he said: “We all fought, for instance,
-with ropes around our necks, the Confederate authorities having denied
-to officers of colored regiments the usual privileges if taken prisoners
-and having required them to be treated as felons.”
-
-Pioneering, moreover, presupposes unrest, discontent, just as it should.
-I am not fearful for the youth whose soul is in a state of unrest, the
-youth who has soaring ideals and knows not whether life is even worth
-living. If that be his problem it is enough for him to know,
-paraphrasing the word of the Jewish fathers, that whether or not life is
-worth living we must live as if it were and we must make life fuller of
-worth. Are you dissatisfied, are you discontented, so much the better
-for you. Hearing from the mother of James Russell Lowell of his general
-discontent with the conditions of society, Emerson wrote to her, “I hope
-he will never get over it.” Better the nobly discontented than the
-ignobly content. Did not John Stuart Mill say that pigs are always
-satisfied and men are always dissatisfied. But let your discontent and
-dissatisfaction be not with the world but with yourself, knowing that if
-it be noble it shall lift you up.
-
-Grave consequences attend the too definite mapping out of life’s
-programme. Men’s passion for and faith in the profession of soldiering
-rest upon youth’s yearning for adventure. And if, perchance, to-day
-great multitudes of men are yearning to take up arms, it is not because
-they would destroy an enemy, but because they would obliterate the
-emptiness of their own lives, because they are in revolt against the
-absence in normal life to-day of the pioneering opportunity. It is this
-lack of stimulus or impulse in the direction of pioneering which makes
-for poor, mean, low substitutes in the realm of adventure. The low gang
-takes the place of high comradeship, the debasing fling becomes a
-substitute for ennobling adventure. The passion for glamour and glare,
-as disclosed in the craze for the motion picture, is only another
-expression of the thwarted sense of adventure which the soul of youth
-dare not be denied.
-
-Seeing that the gang spirit is nothing more than a crude, imperfect, at
-worst sinful, expression of youth’s passion for togetherness, what needs
-to be done is to offer youth an opportunity for the expression of the
-deep yearning for fraternalism. Do young men imagine that they must have
-their fling? Is it not because life as lived is often so flat and stale
-and unprofitable that the fling of the body is substituted for the
-adventure of the spirit, that, failing to grasp hold of the eternal
-realities and verities, men set out to magnify the passing and
-perishable? When everything big is shut out of life it is not to be
-wondered at that life becomes full of meanness and littleness and
-unworthiness.
-
-Give yourself to something great, enroll under the banner of a high
-cause, choose as your own some standard of self-sacrifice, attach
-yourself to a movement that makes not for your own gain but for the
-welfare of men, and you will have come upon a richly satisfying as well
-as engrossing adventure. Either your spirit will greatly and bravely,
-nobly and self-forgettingly adventure, or you will be in danger of
-yielding to the dominance of your appetites, you will be in peril of
-being overcome by your masterful passions. Dare to give every power of
-your life to the furtherance of a mighty cause. Let your spirit come
-under the dominance of a high and exalting enthusiasm. So will you gain
-the mastery over yourself, not as a matter of prudence, not as a matter
-of caution, not as a matter of timidity, not as a matter of duty.
-
-Let something so high and noble come into your life that it shall be
-expulsive of everything low and mean. The men one honors most, the men
-one has reason to cherish most highly, are those into whose lives
-something so lofty and commanding has come as to have left no room for
-the mean and petty. Having given themselves to the furtherance of a high
-and exalted ideal, life leaves no place for the mean. The selfish and
-the unworthy retreats with the precipitancy of the coward before the
-imperiousness of the noble impulse, the divine aim. And to their honor
-be it said, young men and women will rise to the highest level when it
-invites or challenges. There is in the heart of youth a limitless
-capacity for ardent devotion to causes of nobleness if but it be evoked
-and guided. And youth, too, understands how noble the venturesome deed
-may be even when utterly futile, how sublime in essence even when broken
-and foredoomed.
-
-But men cannot finely pioneer nor nobly adventure until after they have
-learned certain lessons in life. Men must learn to be self-reveringly
-independent, which implies not the aloofness of solitude but the
-aloneness when necessary of moral and spiritual self-reliance. Man must
-learn to live his own life. There is no greater danger in our time than
-that a man shall submit to the tyranny of the crowd. A man need not be
-remote from nor yet alien to the world and yet he may live his own life
-and live within himself. We suffer ourselves to come under the
-domination of mob-feeling and mob-thinking, such as it is, because we
-have not learned the art of shutting ourselves away at times from the
-world. We seem never to dare to be alone because, though we know it not,
-we would fain avoid facing life’s problems. We must understand, too,
-that, if the problems of our own life are to be met and solved, these
-things cannot be done vicariously. Not parents nor teachers nor
-ministers can solve those pressing problems of our inner life with which
-a man can cope effectively only amid the solitude of his inmost life.
-Until you have learned the art of separating yourself for some time in
-every day from the multitude, you will not learn how to think out and
-think through life’s problems. You will not even know that there are
-problems to be resolved.
-
-But while life is to be lived in the spirit of self-reverence and
-self-reliance, life’s great questions cannot be faced aright unless they
-be faced selflessly. Life is not to be egocentric but heterocentric. The
-question that a man must put is not what is he going to get out of life,
-how can he get the most out of life, but how can he put the most and the
-best into life. Life is not to be interpreted in terms of self, of
-individual gain, of personal advantage. If it be possible to
-differentiate between two classes in the world, these classes are
-respectively made up of the men who read life in the language of
-privilege and advantage and the men who interpret life in the terms of
-duty and obligation and responsibility. The selfless are the only beings
-who know how to live, who have learned and mastered the art of life. It
-is always possible to draw the distinction between the man who lives for
-himself, for what he can get out of life, for the enhancement of his own
-fame, for the enlargement of his own power, and the man who puts himself
-second, who lives for the good of others, who lives for the good, who is
-capable of denying self. The noblest of men and women are they who
-prescribe life to self in terms of duty to the world.
-
-I venture to say to youth this day that there are two great needs in the
-life of youth, if life is to be truly and finely faced. Have an ideal,
-something to live by, and live for that ideal, wholly, steadfastly,
-unwaveringly. Many men are willing to cherish an ideal, to behold a
-vision, to catch a gleam, but they do not seem to understand that ideals
-are not to be had cheaply, that a vision is not to be gained for the
-asking. One comes upon men and women in every walk of life entirely
-ready to pursue an ideal, but the pursuit must impose no difficulty,
-must involve no sacrifice. These are the idealists who falter not until
-sacrifice be demanded of them, and then their ideal is suffered to pass
-as if the ideal were nothing more than a fair-weather friend rather than
-a refuge in time of trouble, a bulwark during hours of trial and amid
-the storms of temptation.
-
-Nor are ideals reserved for the great and outstanding in life. Every one
-of us has a goal, and you are what your goal is. Your life will
-ultimately define itself in the terms of your ideal. Let your ideal be
-high and it will exalt you. Suffer your ideal to be low and it will be
-sure to debase you. You are your goal: your ideal is you. Life often
-breaks down here, in one of these two critical places, in the matter of
-willing highly and of having holily. Some men have neither vision of
-goal nor choice of way. Some men have the vision but stumble on the
-way,—the men who think the goal more important than the way, forgetting
-that the way is the goal. And so many falter and fumble, forgetting that
-life’s most important choice is as truly of a path as of the goal, that
-the way that leads thither is of the essence of the dream and the
-triumph. What thou wouldst have highly thou must have holily. We will to
-have high things, but we are not prepared to achieve them holily, as if
-the manner of the quest were less holy than the matter of the goal.
-
-Who does not know of men in business who aim to secure a competence and
-are resolved to put by the ways that are sharp and mean, after a fortune
-has been secured? Men vainly imagine that after they have amassed much
-they will neutralize the evil they have done by doing much good, but in
-the meantime they have done evil to themselves and are no longer free to
-live by the ideal. Giving themselves unholily to the quest of the high,
-they have become transformed and debased into something mean and
-strange. One knows of men in the ministry to whom is given the
-putatively wise counsel to be discreetly cautious and evasively silent
-until the time comes for the occupancy of a great pulpit, when, as it is
-basely said, a man can afford to speak out of his soul. But when the
-great pulpit prize is won, the gleam, alas, is gone, the vision lies
-shattered. The man has been corrupted and his soul corroded and he who
-was willing for a time to be silent in the hope that some day, through
-the methods of silence, he might achieve the right of speaking out more
-bravely, has in the meantime become a dumb dog who has lost the power as
-well as the will to utter himself in fashion brave and unafraid.
-
-Seemingly good men, outwardly decent men enter into political life and
-imagine that they must for a time strike hands with corruption until the
-hour will come when they shall be able to smite corruption with their
-own fists. They palter and they falter, whispering sorrowfully, “Truly
-it is regrettable, but one must do these things.” One distinguished
-statesman in American life declared to a friend many years ago that
-there are times when a man must eat a peck of dirt in order to gain high
-office. He gained the office, he ate his peck, and the tragedy is that
-it is not only become the steady article of his diet, but he loves it
-and he would not live without it, that it is become of the very essence
-of his being.
-
-In other words, a man cannot wallow through the mire to the skies. No
-man can have two standards, one to be followed until he be forty or
-fifty, and then suddenly put away. No man can divest himself of the
-lower ideal which he has adopted as a temporary expedient, because in
-the meantime it has come to have the mastery over his soul. Putting
-aside the great choice, the hour comes when a man finds himself
-incapable of the great refusal and the standard to which he gave his
-temporary adherence, to be abandoned in the years of opulence and
-safety, becomes his despotic and inescapable master. It is no more
-possible to have two standards in the world of the spirit than it is
-possible to prescribe two different moral standards for men and women.
-Unity must be sought and achieved at the outset, not a lowered standard
-in the beginning and a higher standard in the end. The habit of the soul
-cannot be altered at will. Once to every man and not a thousand times
-comes the moment to decide, and the earlier decision will in part, if
-not in whole, be determinative of every later choice.
-
-And if, young men and women, there were nothing else for which to
-prepare, there is the future, there is the holy calling of parenthood to
-be pursued by most of you. Have I not the right to appeal to young men
-and women to-day to remember how much or how little they can make of
-their own lives, and may we not base such appeal upon the truth that
-they are to be the makers and the molders of the morrow; that unless
-their lips and lives proclaim the voice of God in the soul of man, there
-will follow a little-souled and mean-hearted generation instead of a
-race of great-hearted and noble-souled men and women.
-
-A beautiful passage in an allegory recently presented upon the stage
-tells of the song of unborn souls, which are dreaming of the parenthood
-to be their lot upon earth and looking forward with heavenly joy to the
-supreme felicity and benediction of parenthood. The most important duty
-of youth is to prepare with consciousness and consecration for life’s
-highest duty,—the duty of parenthood. Shall that future be polluted,
-shall that heritage be befouled? In reminding young men and women as I
-do that they are the trustees of the morrow, that they hold in their
-keeping the destiny of all the future, I am tempted to ask a question.
-What if I were to bring a little child before you, some beautiful child
-of a year or two, and what if some man sitting in this company were to
-come hither and for some unknown reason strike that child: would it not
-be with difficulty that we could restrain ourselves from doing violence
-to such a creature? What of the men and women committing a crime
-infinitely more hurtful, who would not strike a little child, but who,
-none the less, are ready to doom unborn generations to a heritage of
-evil, of hurt, of shame? What young man or woman will not think upon
-that?
-
-A further word should be spoken to young women who in every generation
-are standard-bearers, and not only standard-bearers but
-standard-lifters. I know it to be true that ofttimes women conform to
-the lower standards which men impose upon them. Yet is it true that
-women may be the makers of standards if they will, and that, if they
-consent to the lowering of the standards, men will readily and, alas,
-eagerly lapse to the lower levels. Will not young women understand that,
-if they suffer standards to be lowered, if they for any reason yield to
-the temptation to be their poorer, unworthier selves in the sight of
-men, then will they corrupt men, then will they in very truth have
-broken faith with the moral order which has vested womanhood with the
-supreme privilege of exalting standards and by the exalting of standards
-exalting men.
-
-I have said nothing up to this time about the place of God in the life
-of youth. I never feel it my duty to urge you to believe in God as if
-faith in God, as if trust in God, as if the acceptance of God were a
-task to be superimposed rather than a privilege to be coveted. To young
-men and women I would say that the one thing in the world they may not
-omit to do is to leave room for God in their lives. But you cannot leave
-room for God if your life be choked and clogged with things, and things,
-and things. Leave a place in your life for the spirit of God and God
-will find his way into your life and lead you to the making of a life
-divine.
-
-Reviewing what has gone before, the great thing in life is to map it out
-in youth. Not that one is to refrain from venturing upon the uncharted
-sea but that, howsoever daringly one is ready to fare forth upon the
-seas, one may not forget the guidance of the stars. It is a great thing
-to venture upon the imperiling seas of life without the assurance of
-safety and reward for one’s plans and toils. It is a greater thing so to
-fare forth as to come inevitably under the direction of the fixed stars
-in the heavens of the spirit divine.
-
-Upon a stained window in the dwelling of a noble friend I came upon some
-lines which I commend to the soul of youth everywhere:
-
- “Climb high
- Climb far
- Your goal the sky
- Your aim the star.”
-
-
-
-
- II
-
- MATURITY: HOW TO SERVE AND ACHIEVE
-
-
-Maturity, or the middle period of life, is in a sense the largest part
-of life, and is not to be viewed merely as the period after youth and
-before old age. It is relative only as all time is relative, but it is
-absolute, too. In truth, it is the time of that self-dependence which
-comes with the consciousness of power in maturity. It is the very body
-and substance of life and least relative,—for youth is its foreshadowing
-and old age the shadow which it casts behind. Middle age is not a link
-between youth and old age, but that period of life to which youth is an
-approach,—from which old age is an exit. Comparing life to a bridge,
-youth and old age might be likened to the piers which must be builded,
-but the linking together of the piers, the stretching of the cables over
-which the larger part of life’s pilgrimage must be made is the task of
-life’s middle period.
-
-Life is so constituted that it were almost within the limits of
-reasonableness to urge that life need not pass out of the middle stage
-into old age. Loath though one be to enter upon maturity, it need never
-be left behind in return for age if it be entered upon in the spirit of
-preparedness. Middle age is hard and bitter if youth have been misspent,
-if youth have not been the stage of conscious preparation for life.
-
-Certain rules have been laid down for the governance of youth and the
-question may be asked whether these are pertinent to the needs and tasks
-of middle age,—namely the law that one must have an ideal by which to
-live, and that one must not merely live by it but up to it. As for the
-rules which are to be binding upon the middle period of life, who shall
-venture to prescribe them, save that certain things are obviously
-true,—that middle age shall continue that which youth initiates, and
-that there shall be no sharp frontier dividing youth from that which
-comes after. For middle age is not so much a part of life as it is life,
-and life absolute.
-
-Middle age is but a part of the same life-long journey which in its
-early stages is youth, which culminates in age. And yet in a sense a
-different type of rules and ordinances is applicable to every one of the
-three great periods of life. For life is not a journey, even and
-unvarying, over a wide plain. Life may best be likened to the ascent of
-a mountain and in turn the descent from its summit, and the laws that
-govern life must be variously modified in order to meet the needs of the
-different periods along the journey.
-
-In the early stages, during the hours of the ascent, the imperative
-thing is that a man shall not over-tax his strength, that he shall not
-overstrain his powers in the initial stages of the journey, that he
-shall not attempt too much, that he shall not travel at too wearying a
-pace. As man nears the summit of the mountain, it becomes needful for
-him to conform to other rules. He must not lose the stride, he must know
-how to go on, he must climb and climb without succumbing to the heat of
-the day. Once the descent is begun, yet other rules apply, if one is
-with safety to reach the end of the long journey. The glory of the
-morning no longer upbears him, the splendor of the noonday sun no longer
-maintains his strength. But as he leaves youth’s vigor and the power of
-maturity behind him, the glow of the passing day may irradiate his
-vision and reveal to him the distant horizon.
-
-Middle age seems too often a painful reluctance to leave youth behind
-and to be a more painful hesitancy in the matter of facing the oncoming
-of age. Unhappily for itself, middle age oft combines the childishness
-of immaturity with the senescence of post-maturity so that it lacks
-alike the charm of youth and the grace of age. Old age that is not
-worthy of reverence is contemptible. Not less worthy of contempt is
-middle age, if it have brought from youth nothing save youth’s foibles
-and frailties. We not unseldom see—and it is always a pitiful
-spectacle,—men and women whose bark of life is unballasted by the poise
-that comes with strength and unsteadied by the serenity which ought to
-be the mark of the maturer period. While men speak of the dignity of old
-age, it is in truth the middle age which is in need of dignity, which
-alas it too often lacks.
-
-Men frequently refer to the emptiness and the barrenness of old age,
-when it is oftenest middle age that is empty and meaningless, for it is
-the time when life’s emptiness is disclosed. It is in middle age that
-men are made to face the bitter truth that theirs is not to achieve and
-to serve because they have not set up any standards worthy of the name,
-because their goal, such as it is, is too immediately accessible, and
-they cannot serve because self, having been their very deity, has not
-suffered them to will to serve or to learn how to serve.
-
-The temptation of middle age is to yield to the spirit of
-disenchantment, though verily that is oft-times called disenchantment
-which means nothing more than the absence of enchantments. The
-temptation of middle age is not so much to give up ideals as to realize
-that one is without them. Then men mistake their poor plans and
-plottings, their puny purposes for ideals and wonder why they have lost
-that which in truth they never had. Men rarely lose ideals. Poor,
-imperfect substitutes for ideals are found out and find out their
-owners,—if so they may be named. Men are not to fear losing ideals in
-middle age. They are to fear not having them in youth so that they
-cannot hold them throughout life.
-
-Middle age depends upon youth, and its disillusionments are due chiefly
-to the absence of illusions in the time of youth. In middle and in old
-age men suddenly discover that they cannot reap what in youth they have
-failed to sow. That middle age finds the ideals of youth unsatisfying
-and even unengrossing, indicts only youth and not itself, shows that the
-map of life, if drawn at all and as drawn in youth, was not ample and
-generous enough to have proved sufficing for a lifetime.
-
-Assuming that middle age is less joyous than youth, it enjoys one
-supreme satisfaction, or rather reaps one supreme compensation, that of
-the consciousness of two powers, two of life’s sovereign powers, the
-power to achieve and the power to serve. If youth initiates, middle age
-most achieves and best serves,—most achieves because it is a time of
-fullness of intellectual strength and firmness of moral will; best
-serves because the stains of self have been or ought to have been burnt
-out and there is left the capacity of selfless enlistment under banners
-unrelated to personal gain or private advantage. The middle age that men
-find bare and unsatisfying is in truth that to them who have not
-mastered the two arts of life, achieving and serving.
-
-Certain mistakes are not uncommon in respect of the interpretation of
-middle age, for example, that it is not the period of high initiative.
-Because things are not initiated with dash and flare, it is assumed that
-middle age undertakes nothing. On the contrary, it is then and perhaps
-only then that things are begun and achieved for their own sake, that
-things are really undertaken in the consciousness of strength and with a
-capacity for achievement. Moreover, while little can be carried into and
-beyond middle age that is not initiated in youth, the soul of man has
-not in the middle period forfeited or abandoned the power of
-self-correction and self-redemption. It may not be easy, neither is it
-impossible.
-
-Perhaps the supreme rule for middle age may be phrased in the fewest of
-words,—_don’t stop growing_! Physical and intellectual maturity are not
-interchangeable terms. The truth is that men almost consciously cease to
-grow, and even will not to grow at thirty-five and forty and forty-five
-and then proceed to wonder why life is so unsatisfying. Let men but
-remember that there is no such thing as maturity in life,—if maturity
-mean the cessation of growth,—for maturity were followed by
-post-maturity, which is over-ripeness.
-
-Men need never cease to grow and mature. Men will either grow up or go
-down. The great and satisfying lives are those of men and women who grow
-on and go on until they are cut down. When Freeman died, he asked that
-on his gravestone be carved the words, “He died learning.” He who grows
-and learns dies not. Continue, as long as thou wouldst grow, to learn
-and reason and purpose, nor yet imagine that life is done when youth is
-ended. Nor let the middle-aged forget that going on is not the only
-possibility. Even in middle age a man may reserve for himself freedom,
-freedom of choice, freedom to revise life’s foundations, freedom to
-begin anew if so be error have been made.
-
-Above all, middle age must not lose its admirations, its reverences, its
-enthusiasms. The edge of enthusiasm may be dulled with the passing of
-the years,—but the body and substance of one’s admirations need not be
-diminished, and by our admirations we live. Anatole France, speaking of
-the old campaigners of the Reserve, uses this finely stimulating word
-with regard to them,—“they unite the elasticity of youth with the
-staunchness of maturity.” There is another and an older way of
-describing the characteristic quality of middle age, which must combine
-“the wisdom of age and the heart of youth.”
-
-
-
-
- III
-
- AGE: HOW NOT TO GROW OLD
-
-
- “But why, you ask me, should this tale be told
- To men grown old, or who are growing old?
- It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late
- Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
-
- * * * * *
-
- What, then? Shall we sit idly down and say
- The night hath come; it is no longer day?
- The night hath not yet come; we are not quite
- Cut off from labor by the failing light;
- Something remains for us to do or dare;
- Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear.
-
- * * * * *
-
- For age is opportunity no less
- Than youth itself, though in another dress,
- And as the evening twilight fades away
- The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”
-
- —LONGFELLOW: _Morituri Salutamus_.
-
-
-Old age depends largely upon the attitude of men toward the whole of
-life. Old age is not a joke nor a bore nor a trial nor a calamity,
-though it may be any one of these as all of life may be. But what needs
-to be stressed is that old age has no content in itself apart from the
-whole of life. Old age may be as nothing else a foretaste of the kingdom
-of heaven where faith and hope may meet and love crown all. But little
-can come to old age that was not in and throughout life. Alas for the
-old age of the self-centered and self-serving! If life have built walls
-that shut out, these cannot be razed by age, which will forever have
-made itself captive.
-
-The crown of old age is a term that trips lightly from our tongues. Are
-we not in danger of forgetting that there must be something to crown?
-For in old age inheres no magic to redeem and transfigures all that has
-gone before. Old age purges the precious metal of life’s substance of
-its debasing dross, but the precious substance must be there to be
-purged. Age, like happiness, is neither to be sought nor evaded. It is a
-by-product of life rather than life’s end. Not the aim nor goal of life,
-but the way of life must it be.
-
-In the matter of reverencing old age, we rest historically upon the
-firmest Jewish foundation. For the Jew as no other man before or after
-him taught the world how to magnify childhood and to glorify old age,—to
-rise up before the hoary head and honor the face of the old man. And
-this revering solicitude for the aged is still one of the marks of
-Jewish life. Jewish teaching has urged and Jewish practice has confirmed
-the truth that blessing rests upon that home in which the aged have
-found shelter.
-
-Indeed, one is almost disposed to hold that there is a possibility of
-overdoing reverence for old age as old age, of becoming indiscriminating
-in the honor which one metes out to the hoary head. If the people of
-Israel have erred in any part with respect to old age, they have revered
-the aged head too much irrespective of the head and the man. I would not
-if I could break with that fine tradition, but, sometimes, it were well
-to ask whether old age is to be respected as a virtue in itself, whether
-length of days should be regarded as a merit apart from what has gone
-before. Old age is judged compassionately on the principle that nothing
-but the good should be spoken touching the dead or the nearly dead.
-
-One is sometimes moved to believe that if the aged are unhappy it is
-because age brings with it not only opportunity for quiet meditation and
-serene retrospect, but the necessity of thinking about the great issues
-of life. And many of us have never learned how to think. We have put off
-the evil day of taking thought upon life so that, when it at last comes,
-its imminence appalls. Men and women put off their questions and their
-problems to the end of life and when the end is nearly come, they lack
-the strength and will to think them through. The need of solutions is
-then cruelly pressed upon unpracticed and undisciplined minds.
-
-Though I ask the question, how to grow old and how not to grow old, are
-we not, if we will be frank, more interested in the question how not to
-grow old than how to grow old? In the question, pressing a little
-farther, how to seem not to grow old rather than how not grow old?
-Seeming not to grow old may be attained by artificial means. Not to grow
-old may be achieved by inward grace alone. Need it be said that no one
-is ever deceived by external methods of averting age, nor is any one
-profited or helped save perhaps the chemist and the dye-maker, save the
-babblers and praters of new substitutes for old faiths? Whosoever thinks
-of old age aright, whosoever has fitted himself for the dignity of the
-burden of many days will resort neither to renewing cosmetics nor novel
-cults as a refuge from old age.
-
-Men speak of the penalties of old age and penalties there are, but what
-of its rewards, rich and abundant and wondrous, richer indeed in most
-cases than its desert? The old, because they are old, are treated for
-the most part as if they were travelers returning richly laden with
-stores of varied treasures from a voyage over remotest seas to some
-strange and wondrous spot. Old age in itself is no more a reward than a
-penalty. And yet what rewards, paraphrasing Shakespeare, accompany old
-age, and how fitting that these rewards, friendship-bearing,
-honor-bringing, should wait upon what might elsewise be life’s
-melancholy end!
-
-The truth is that old age is not a period of rewards nor penalties in
-themselves. It is a time of duties, as every period offers life’s cup
-with duties brimming o’er. Duties there are,—but there are privileges
-beyond estimate. And the privilege of privileges is to offer an example
-to others in all ways and most of all in the way of facing life with
-serenity. Finer far for old age to claim its duties than to enjoy its
-privileges for the old ought to shun being pitied as weak and seek
-rather to be admired as strong and honored as serene.
-
-When old age has the grace of exalting duty and subordinating privilege,
-it ceases to be the period of mute resignation. From one point of view,
-it is the age of resignation, for one wittingly resigns in part what
-death is wholly to take away, but, be it made clear, resignation is not
-inaction, renunciation is not willlessly surrendering torpor. These
-things imply will, action, choice, not merely an awaiting of the end
-without murmur or complaint. For old age waits not but wills; old age
-surrenders not but whilst life is renders return for life.
-
-While different types of laws seem to obtain for youth, maturity and old
-age, these yet are one and one spirit seems to pervade and dominate all.
-Let youth hold high its aim and pursue high aims through holy means. Let
-maturity serve and achieve and above all achieve only that it may serve
-with unimpaired admiration and undimmed ideals. And let old age be nobly
-wise and unafraid and unselfish to the end!
-
-Much, if not everything, of the content of old age depends on the things
-for which one cares. If one care for the things that cannot survive
-youth or middle age, whose value is inevitably lessened with the flight
-of years, then old age must become barren and empty. Whether your old
-age is to be void and meaningless depends almost wholly not upon what
-you have and care for at seventy or eighty, but what it was you sought
-to have at twenty, what you cared for at thirty, what you cherished at
-forty. Certain things may be harmless, even admirable in themselves, and
-yet are destined to be woefully disappointing if they are suffered to
-become the pursuits of a lifetime and men give themselves to things for
-which they cannot care when the years have multiplied.
-
-Myopia may interfere with one’s zest for looking upon motion pictures,
-limbs may become too rheumatic for dancing, tragic though this may
-sound, the hazard of games of chance may lose its fascination, even
-money-making, the accumulation of things, may pall or become impossible.
-But certain things there are that can never grow stale nor wearying nor
-seem unprofitable. Upon these let men fix their vision and their aim,
-the pleasures of the mind, the tasks of the spirit, the possibilities of
-serving. It is almost life’s greatest danger that life will be lived
-with care for things interest in which cannot survive youth and middle
-age. What if a man were so to train himself physically that he could run
-and do nothing else, so that after the period of running had passed, he
-could not walk! Would not such modus vivendi seem unwise and sadly
-blundering?
-
-Would you avoid growing old? Do you will even to seem not to grow old?
-Then have a vision of life and amid a multiplicity of things have and
-hold, cherish and pursue an ideal. To the man of ideals, to the man who
-in other words lives, age comes not. Age cannot touch nor wither nor
-blast the life pervaded and smitten through by ideals. Would you grow
-old, or rather would you not grow old, then live, and live by the stars.
-Such are the lives of the unaging. In order not to grow old, I say
-again, grow on in faith and hopefulness, in vision and serviceableness.
-Being without these things, some men cannot grow old, they are old.
-Unhappily for them, they were born old, as other men, whatever be the
-number of their years, die young. Having these things, age cannot ravage
-the spirit.
-
-Such men and women are age-proof, their heads may be silver white, their
-frames bowed, their limbs palsied, but age they know not,—the men I have
-in mind, such men as that great physician who, after sixty years and
-more of unwearied and unrivaled service, is still an impassioned pleader
-for the right of the child, of the merest, puniest babe. Who will dare
-say that he is aged, who at fourscore and more spends himself utterly in
-the service of the least of these? I am thinking of yet another friend
-of fourscore and more, whose life is nobly dedicated to the furtherance
-of amity between faith and faith, who serves all men as brothers, who
-proves that he is a Christian by the love he bears the Jew. And I am
-thinking of yet another man who likewise has lived for fourscore years,
-perhaps the foremost educator of our generation, a publicist of
-matchless felicity in utterance and conduct alike, a man who at eighty
-and more steps into the arena with all the power and eagerness of youth
-in order to take up arms on behalf of another great though much wronged
-servant of the nation.
-
-It was once said of Theodore Parker that he gave himself unreservedly
-and with abandon to whatever truth, duty, love, the three sublime voices
-of God,—the real trinity in our souls,—commanded. Truth, duty, love!
-Have you tried these things? Have you dared to live by them and for
-them, by and for any one of them? Does not this word bear out what was
-recently said by a great American physician about a noble social
-worker,—that individual, who has no object in life, who simply works day
-by day, with the idea that he is making a dollar and is going to use the
-dollar for his own comfort, cannot have a very peaceful mind. But if one
-has an object in life, to attain certain things which will be helpful to
-others, and whose day is filled with that sort of work, that individual
-deserves,—and other things being equal,—will have an old age.
-
-Truth, duty, love,—obey their command and when you do you shall find age
-a fiction and life alone a reality. What if old age be without teeth and
-eyes if it be not without hope and faith and fadeless memories!
-
- “To suffer and endure,
- To keep the spirit pure—
- The fortress and abode of holy Truth—
- To serve eternal things
- Whate’er the issue brings
- This is not broken Age, but ageless Youth.”
-
-If then life be centered on self, old age may rest in the certitude of
-disappointment and disillusion. But if self be centered on life, then
-may come what Morley described, touching Edmund Burke, as “an
-unrebellious temper and hopes undimmed for mankind.”
-
-Twofold must be the hope of man,—for a future for self and for the
-future for all. And when the soul is so freighted with hopes, then shall
-it be said of a man as it was said of the great poet: “He was one of
-those on the lookout for every new idea and for every old idea with a
-new application, which may tend to meet the growing requirements of
-society; one of those who are like men standing on a watch-tower to whom
-others apply and say, not ‘What of the night?’ but ‘What of the morning
-and of the coming day?’”
-
-My one word of counsel is,—let life not be centered on self, for to live
-for self is to invite cruel disaster in old age. The saddest, in truth
-the most tragic, lives I know are those of old men and women who have
-nothing to live for because they have lived for self and self alone,—and
-self is nothing. Their lives are piteously empty. For the restlessness
-and excitement of youth may hide this truth, but age, like death, is a
-revealer. And there are many types of selfishness. I speak of two which
-must suffice. There are those who live for self,—for selfissimus, giving
-not the utmost for the highest but all for the nighest,—self, self,
-self, self’s pleasure and profit and power and vantage and fame. These
-are the most crude and obvious types of the selfful, who shall pay the
-penalty of their folly and their moral disease.
-
-But, though it be said to your dismay, there are other types of
-selfishness, though less obvious,—the selfishness of those who project
-self into and magnify self in family relationship. For there are those
-who simply extend the horizon of self enough to include other forms of
-self, one’s own, one’s nearest, one’s flesh and blood. And here, too,
-disillusion is bound to come and ought to come, for one’s own cannot and
-ought not to fill one’s life forever. One might well excuse our mothers
-and fathers for giving their thought and attention to their own, for
-these were many and life was hard and life’s struggle ofttimes bitter.
-But for the fewest is such excuse valid now,—if ever it was
-valid—especially seeing that we concentrate upon the giving to others of
-things rather than upon helping others to their highest and best. In
-truth, people concentrate upon self, upon their own interests and
-wishes, and these things pass and little or nothing is left in life save
-self. Live for yourself, and you live two years in one; live in the life
-of others, and you divide your years with another.
-
-Is not all this a paraphrase of what Emerson has said better than any
-other? He who loves is in no condition old. Not lives and lives for
-self, not loves self and self alone, but he who loves! Emerson, building
-better perhaps than he knew, has voiced the deepest truth of the soul.
-Love cannot die and love will not let die nor yet grow old. And yet as a
-final word, and more needed than all else, I would say that there is
-only one way to grow old, and that too is the only way not to grow old.
-That way is to know, to love, to serve.
-
- “Grow old along with me!
- The Best is yet to be,
- The last of life for which the first was made;
- Our times are in His hand
- Who saith, ‘A whole I planned,’
- Youth shows but half: Trust God: see all nor be afraid.”
-
-
-
-
-
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-
-<pre>
-
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of How to Face Life, by Stephen Samuel Wise
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-Title: How to Face Life
-
-Author: Stephen Samuel Wise
-
-Editor: Edward Howard Griggs
-
-Release Date: December 1, 2019 [EBook #60826]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOW TO FACE LIFE ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Turgut Dincer, Nigel Blower and the Online
-Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
-file was produced from images generously made available
-by The Internet Archive)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
-
-<div>
- <h1 class='c000'><i><span class='c001'>How to Face Life</span></i></h1>
-</div>
-
-<div class='chapter'>
-
-<div class='pbb'>
- <hr class='pb c002' />
-</div>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class='nf-center-c1'>
- <div class='nf-center'>
- <div><span class='large'>THE ART OF LIFE SERIES</span></div>
- <div><span class='large'><i>Edward Howard Griggs, Editor</i></span></div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<hr class='c003' />
-
-<div class='nf-center-c1'>
-<div class='nf-center c004'>
- <div><span class='xxlarge'><b>How to Face Life</b></span></div>
- <div class='c005'>BY</div>
- <div class='c005'><span class='large'>STEPHEN S. WISE</span></div>
- <div><span class='small'>Rabbi of the Free Synagogue, New York</span></div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class='figcenter id001'>
-<img src='images/bwh.jpg' alt='' class='ig001' />
-</div>
-
-<div class='nf-center-c1'>
- <div class='nf-center'>
- <div>NEW YORK</div>
- <div><span class='large'>B. W. HUEBSCH</span></div>
- <div>MCMXVII</div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class='chapter'>
-
-<div class='pbb'>
- <hr class='pb c005' />
-</div>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class='nf-center-c1'>
-<div class='nf-center c002'>
- <div>COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY</div>
- <div><span class='large'>B. W. HUEBSCH</span></div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class='nf-center-c1'>
-<div class='nf-center c002'>
- <div><span class='small'>PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</span></div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class='chapter'>
-
-<div class='pbb'>
- <hr class='pb c005' />
-</div>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class='nf-center-c1'>
- <div class='nf-center'>
- <div>TO</div>
- <div>MY LOUTINJIM</div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class='chapter'>
-
-<div class='pbb'>
- <hr class='pb c005' />
-</div>
-
-</div>
-
-<div>
- <h2 class='c006'>CONTENTS</h2>
-</div>
-
-<div class='nf-center-c1'>
-<div class='nf-center c004'>
- <div><span class='large'>I&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;YOUTH</span></div>
- <div class='c005'>PREPARING FOR LIFE</div>
- <div class='c005'><a href='#Page_9'>PAGE 9</a></div>
- <div class='c004'><span class='large'>II&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;MATURITY</span></div>
- <div class='c005'>HOW TO SERVE AND ACHIEVE</div>
- <div class='c005'><a href='#Page_48'>PAGE 48</a></div>
- <div class='c004'><span class='large'>III&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;AGE</span></div>
- <div class='c005'>HOW NOT TO GROW OLD</div>
- <div class='c005'><a href='#Page_62'>PAGE 62</a></div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class='chapter'>
-
-<div class='pbb'>
- <hr class='pb c005' />
-</div>
-
-</div>
-
-<div>
- <span class='pageno' id='Page_9'>9</span>
- <h2 class='c006'>I <br /> <br /> <span class='c007'>YOUTH: PREPARING FOR LIFE</span></h2>
-</div>
-
-<div class='lg-container-l c008'>
- <div class='linegroup'>
- <div class='group'>
- <div class='line'>“<span class='sc'>How</span> beautiful is youth! How bright it gleams.</div>
- <div class='line'>With its illusions, aspirations, dreams!</div>
- <div class='line'>Book of Beginnings, Story without End,</div>
- <div class='line'>Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!</div>
- <div class='line'>Aladdin’s Lamp, and Fortunatus’ Purse!</div>
- <div class='line'>That holds the treasures of the universe!</div>
- <div class='line'>All possibilities are in its hands,</div>
- <div class='line'>No danger daunts it and no foe withstands;</div>
- <div class='line'>In its sublime audacity of faith,</div>
- <div class='line'>‘Be thou removed,’ it to the mountain saith,</div>
- <div class='line'>And with ambitious feet, secure and proud,</div>
- <div class='line'>Ascends the ladder leaning on the cloud.”</div>
- </div>
- <div class='group'>
- <div class='line in2'>—<span class='sc'>Longfellow</span>: <i>Morituri Salutamus</i>.</div>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<p class='c009'>How to face life, how to prepare for
-life, are questions that must be answered
-by those who believe, as Lecky put it,
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_10'>10</span>that the “map of life” must be marked
-out, that in the words of Emerson there
-is such a thing as the “conduct of life”
-which man is free to determine.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>We are assured incessantly in these
-days that we must enter upon a great
-programme of preparedness for war,—back
-of which urging lies the assumption
-that a maximum of preparedness
-must be arranged in order to secure our
-land against the menace of aggression
-or invasion. If a programme of preparedness,
-which in the last analysis involves
-destruction and desolation, be
-impossible without the fullest planning,
-how much less possible is it to shape a
-constructive life-upbuilding programme
-without most careful and adequate preparedness.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_11'>11</span>Into the mind of youth must penetrate
-the ideal of self-preparedness,—not of
-external preparation for the outward
-life, but of inmost preparedness for the
-inner life. Whether or not the preparedness
-programme be, as some hold,
-more menacing to the soul of America
-than foreign foe can ever become because
-it marks an immediate invasion of
-the American soul rather than a possible
-aggression upon American soil, it
-is certain that life cannot worthily be
-lived save after preparedness in the
-fullest sense of the term.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>It is, in truth, easy to stir up excitement
-and even deeper feeling over a
-purely external problem such as is that
-of war-preparedness, preparing to do
-something to another whether an individual
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_12'>12</span>or a nation or a continent.
-The easiest way is the way of external
-preparedness, the militaristic way, for it
-involves a minimum of reasoning. But
-preparation for life which I ask of
-youth involves the largest measure of
-reasoning and planning and purposing.
-It is the hardest way rather than the
-easiest way, though the pursuit thereof
-makes ultimately for the way that is
-inevitably rightful and unerring.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Is it needful to urge upon young people
-that they shall face life with the determination
-to sketch for themselves a
-map of life as they see it, as they purpose,
-if so be they purpose, to make it?
-What would be said of a military commander
-who entered upon a land to him
-unknown without securing in advance
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_13'>13</span>the fullest possible data, without gaining,
-as far as it was possible so to do, an
-understanding of the outlines of the
-country he proposed to enter?</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Curiously enough, it is often imagined
-that preparation for life is
-largely a matter of the higher education
-and exclusively associated with college
-and university life. This imagining
-may be due to the circumstance that
-men and women step out of so-called
-preparatory schools into higher institutions
-of learning. One sometimes
-wonders, in very truth, whether, instead
-of college preparing men for life, it
-were not more fitting to hold that after
-the college or university experience men
-need to be repaired if they are rightly to
-live and toil and serve.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_14'>14</span>My counsel is not for men alone but
-for men and women, for youth and
-maidens alike. Let no man venture to
-offer two kinds of counsel, one to men
-and yet another to women. There is
-only one manner of preparedness for
-life, for life is life and it is not one
-thing for a man and yet another for a
-woman.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Though I have used the term “map
-of life,” map is hardly a happy analogy.
-For maps presuppose that a land is become
-known and familiar. And life
-cannot be foreknown and charted, if
-life it is to be, as every life ought to be,
-a great adventure into the unknown
-rather than the acceptance of a programme,
-a hazard of the spirit rather
-than a body of prescriptions and ordinances.
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_15'>15</span>We are to fare forth upon the
-seas of life,—without chart. But some
-of us attempt to sail the sea rudderless,
-helmless, starless. Men and women
-embark upon life without ever having
-given thought to the storms that beset, to
-the rocks that threaten, to the unknown
-perils that may lie before. And then it
-is wondered why many fail to make
-port, why the ships of life frequently
-founder upon the high seas. The wonder
-ought rather to be that so many enter
-triumphantly into the harbors of
-eternity, seeing how rarely men map out
-life in advance, seeing how grudging is
-the time spent upon preparation, seeing
-how seldom men diligently and consciously
-prepare to meet those difficulties
-and burdens and problems which
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_16'>16</span>adequate preparedness for life alone
-can fit the soul to face.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Let not life be mapped out so definitely
-for you, so accurately and systematically
-that no room will be left for the
-play of your own will and the determinations
-of your own spirit. I would almost
-rather have every map of life flung
-away than have life so mapped out as to
-leave youth no freedom of choice, as to
-fail to spur men on to face the great adventure,
-to be capable of daring to front
-whatsoever life may offer. Not very
-long ago, I inquired of friends, whose
-little lad is a pupil of one of the so-called
-best schools in the land, when they had
-applied for his admittance, and they answered,
-“Before he was born.” It occurred
-to me to inquire what dire thing
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_17'>17</span>would have happened in the event of the
-lad having proved upon birth to be a
-little lass, but the comforting assurance
-was at once given me that such contingency,
-not to say calamity, had been
-guarded against, in a sense, through applying
-for admittance to a girls’ school
-in the event of the lad being born a lass.
-It seemed to me then as it does now an
-admirable thing to make such comprehensive
-provision for a child’s education
-as to gain for it in advance of birth admittance
-into two schools, irrespective
-of sex.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>But, without resting too heavily upon
-this illustration, is it not possible to prepare
-another for life so definitely as to
-deny to youth the privilege of willing,
-choosing, venturing, daring—even losing?
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_18'>18</span>It were almost better that a youth
-go without the problematic advantages
-of school discipline than have his school
-and college and university career chosen
-and marked out for him rigidly and inflexibly.
-What greater wrong can I do
-my child than to withhold from him the
-freedom of choice, than so to cabin and
-confine his spirit that he must needs beat
-his wings in the intense inane without
-knowing the atmosphere that magnifies
-freedom and liberates the soul? Guide
-if you will the life of youth, but beware
-of the danger of maiming and crippling
-life through so definitely and completely
-mapping it out as to deny the soul of
-youth the peril of adventure, the joy
-of combat, the glory of hopeless daring.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_19'>19</span>Life must mean pioneering, not making
-one’s way, but breaking a way, clearing
-a path of life for one’s self. It is
-the glory of life,—and there is no glory
-like unto it,—to face the task of moral
-and intellectual pioneering. There is
-danger lest in our time there pass out of
-the life of men one of the most precious
-of things, that pioneering spirit that
-comes to the man who after he has
-fared forth, braved every danger, stood
-every peril at bay, declares in the word
-of the poet:</p>
-
-<div class='lg-container-b'>
- <div class='linegroup'>
- <div class='group'>
- <div class='line'>“Anybody might have heard it</div>
- <div class='line'>But God’s whisper came to me.”</div>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<p class='c009'>The whisper of God comes to every
-man or to every man it may come. The
-opportunity for the performance of the
-task of moral or spiritual pioneering is
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_20'>20</span>denied to no man. Americas of the
-spirit remain to be discovered within
-the life of every one of us. What man
-or woman who may read this will affirm
-that there has never come into his life
-a revelation the gleam of which enables
-him to see that he is free to reach a
-great decision, that his spirit may dare
-a great refusal, that his soul may utter
-a great affirmation? The great moment
-of life is that in which a man is
-revealed unto himself, in which his soul
-is laid bare, in which it comes to him
-with the force of a revelation,—mine
-is the power to will and to determine
-the content of my life, though if I am to
-will I must dare to be myself, I must
-reach the decision, I must will, I must
-be free.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_21'>21</span>And the freedom of youth means
-freedom to be one’s self, to be a law
-unto one’s self, not to be one’s self in
-lawlessness. Choose ye this day whom
-ye will serve,—remembering that the
-responsibility of decision rests with you
-and that, in the despite of all the lives
-that have been lived and all the maps
-that have been drawn and all the plans
-that have been sketched and all the precedents
-that have been set, you must
-live your own life, and, if it be not your
-own life, it is not life at all. Cherish
-the counsels of loved ones but remember
-that neither mother nor father, uncle
-nor cousin nor any kinsman or kinswoman
-whosoever can choose whom you
-are to serve. You cannot serve God
-unless yours be the choice.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_22'>22</span>Young men and women require to be
-warned against a thousand and one influences
-ever lurking near at hand to deter
-youth from the hazard of the spirit’s
-pioneering. Despise the counsels of
-the over-wise and over-mature, the sum
-of whose low wisdom is that a man can
-make no graver mistake in life than to
-wander from the paths which all men
-else have pursued. The fear of seeming
-unusual obsesses the soul of too
-many of us. Not a few men and women
-would rather be wrong than seem
-different. Difference, variance, distinctiveness
-are not ends in themselves,
-but may become and ofttimes are the
-means that must be used by him who is
-not fearful of moral distinction.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Outward differentiation is nothing,
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_23'>23</span>but inward distinction is everything,—is
-the counsel I ever urge upon my fellow-Jews.
-We are not to seem different
-for the sake of seeming, but we are
-to dare to seem to be different in order
-to be distinguished, in order to achieve
-spiritual outstandingness. When nice
-and refined and timid people say to you,
-“Remember to be like everybody else,
-don’t attempt anything new, don’t run
-the risk of seeming peculiar, don’t
-dream of venturing upon novel courses
-whether in things great or small,” remember
-that there is a possible invasion
-of the soul’s integrity that no man need
-endure. To the counsels of the timorous
-fling back the command to the
-brave: “Always do what you are
-afraid to do.”</p>
-
-<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_24'>24</span>When men seek to affright you by
-their counsels of prudence, remind them
-of the rule of one of the knightliest of
-Americans, the founder of Hampton Institute,
-who laid upon one youth’s soul
-the burden: “doing what can’t be done
-is the glory of living.” And when men
-seek to degrade you to the level of their
-own base timidity, bid them to remember
-the courage and nobleness that were
-in the act of Higginson in leading a
-negro regiment touching which he said:
-“We all fought, for instance, with ropes
-around our necks, the Confederate authorities
-having denied to officers of
-colored regiments the usual privileges
-if taken prisoners and having required
-them to be treated as felons.”</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Pioneering, moreover, presupposes
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_25'>25</span>unrest, discontent, just as it should. I
-am not fearful for the youth whose soul
-is in a state of unrest, the youth who
-has soaring ideals and knows not
-whether life is even worth living. If
-that be his problem it is enough for him
-to know, paraphrasing the word of the
-Jewish fathers, that whether or not life
-is worth living we must live as if it were
-and we must make life fuller of worth.
-Are you dissatisfied, are you discontented,
-so much the better for you.
-Hearing from the mother of James
-Russell Lowell of his general discontent
-with the conditions of society, Emerson
-wrote to her, “I hope he will
-never get over it.” Better the nobly
-discontented than the ignobly content.
-Did not John Stuart Mill say that pigs
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_26'>26</span>are always satisfied and men are always
-dissatisfied. But let your discontent and
-dissatisfaction be not with the world
-but with yourself, knowing that if it
-be noble it shall lift you up.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Grave consequences attend the too
-definite mapping out of life’s programme.
-Men’s passion for and faith
-in the profession of soldiering rest upon
-youth’s yearning for adventure. And
-if, perchance, to-day great multitudes of
-men are yearning to take up arms, it is
-not because they would destroy an enemy,
-but because they would obliterate
-the emptiness of their own lives, because
-they are in revolt against the absence in
-normal life to-day of the pioneering opportunity.
-It is this lack of stimulus
-or impulse in the direction of pioneering
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_27'>27</span>which makes for poor, mean, low
-substitutes in the realm of adventure.
-The low gang takes the place of high
-comradeship, the debasing fling becomes
-a substitute for ennobling adventure.
-The passion for glamour and glare, as
-disclosed in the craze for the motion
-picture, is only another expression of the
-thwarted sense of adventure which the
-soul of youth dare not be denied.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Seeing that the gang spirit is nothing
-more than a crude, imperfect, at worst
-sinful, expression of youth’s passion for
-togetherness, what needs to be done is
-to offer youth an opportunity for the
-expression of the deep yearning for fraternalism.
-Do young men imagine
-that they must have their fling? Is it
-not because life as lived is often so flat
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_28'>28</span>and stale and unprofitable that the fling
-of the body is substituted for the adventure
-of the spirit, that, failing to grasp
-hold of the eternal realities and verities,
-men set out to magnify the passing and
-perishable? When everything big is
-shut out of life it is not to be wondered
-at that life becomes full of meanness
-and littleness and unworthiness.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Give yourself to something great, enroll
-under the banner of a high cause,
-choose as your own some standard of
-self-sacrifice, attach yourself to a movement
-that makes not for your own gain
-but for the welfare of men, and you will
-have come upon a richly satisfying as
-well as engrossing adventure. Either
-your spirit will greatly and bravely,
-nobly and self-forgettingly adventure,
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_29'>29</span>or you will be in danger of yielding to
-the dominance of your appetites, you
-will be in peril of being overcome by
-your masterful passions. Dare to give
-every power of your life to the furtherance
-of a mighty cause. Let your spirit
-come under the dominance of a high and
-exalting enthusiasm. So will you gain
-the mastery over yourself, not as a matter
-of prudence, not as a matter of caution,
-not as a matter of timidity, not as
-a matter of duty.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Let something so high and noble
-come into your life that it shall be expulsive
-of everything low and mean.
-The men one honors most, the men one
-has reason to cherish most highly, are
-those into whose lives something so
-lofty and commanding has come as to
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_30'>30</span>have left no room for the mean and
-petty. Having given themselves to the
-furtherance of a high and exalted ideal,
-life leaves no place for the mean. The
-selfish and the unworthy retreats with
-the precipitancy of the coward before
-the imperiousness of the noble impulse,
-the divine aim. And to their honor be
-it said, young men and women will rise
-to the highest level when it invites or
-challenges. There is in the heart of
-youth a limitless capacity for ardent devotion
-to causes of nobleness if but it
-be evoked and guided. And youth, too,
-understands how noble the venturesome
-deed may be even when utterly futile,
-how sublime in essence even when
-broken and foredoomed.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>But men cannot finely pioneer nor
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_31'>31</span>nobly adventure until after they have
-learned certain lessons in life. Men
-must learn to be self-reveringly independent,
-which implies not the aloofness
-of solitude but the aloneness when
-necessary of moral and spiritual self-reliance.
-Man must learn to live his
-own life. There is no greater danger
-in our time than that a man shall submit
-to the tyranny of the crowd. A man
-need not be remote from nor yet alien to
-the world and yet he may live his own
-life and live within himself. We suffer
-ourselves to come under the domination
-of mob-feeling and mob-thinking, such
-as it is, because we have not learned
-the art of shutting ourselves away at
-times from the world. We seem never
-to dare to be alone because, though we
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_32'>32</span>know it not, we would fain avoid facing
-life’s problems. We must understand,
-too, that, if the problems of our own
-life are to be met and solved, these
-things cannot be done vicariously. Not
-parents nor teachers nor ministers can
-solve those pressing problems of our inner
-life with which a man can cope effectively
-only amid the solitude of his
-inmost life. Until you have learned the
-art of separating yourself for some time
-in every day from the multitude, you
-will not learn how to think out and think
-through life’s problems. You will not
-even know that there are problems to be
-resolved.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>But while life is to be lived in the
-spirit of self-reverence and self-reliance,
-life’s great questions cannot be faced
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_33'>33</span>aright unless they be faced selflessly.
-Life is not to be egocentric but heterocentric.
-The question that a man
-must put is not what is he going to
-get out of life, how can he get the
-most out of life, but how can he put
-the most and the best into life. Life
-is not to be interpreted in terms of
-self, of individual gain, of personal advantage.
-If it be possible to differentiate
-between two classes in the world,
-these classes are respectively made up
-of the men who read life in the language
-of privilege and advantage and the men
-who interpret life in the terms of duty
-and obligation and responsibility. The
-selfless are the only beings who know
-how to live, who have learned and mastered
-the art of life. It is always possible
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_34'>34</span>to draw the distinction between the
-man who lives for himself, for what he
-can get out of life, for the enhancement
-of his own fame, for the enlargement of
-his own power, and the man who puts
-himself second, who lives for the good
-of others, who lives for the good, who
-is capable of denying self. The noblest
-of men and women are they who prescribe
-life to self in terms of duty to the
-world.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>I venture to say to youth this day
-that there are two great needs in the
-life of youth, if life is to be truly and
-finely faced. Have an ideal, something
-to live by, and live for that ideal,
-wholly, steadfastly, unwaveringly.
-Many men are willing to cherish an
-ideal, to behold a vision, to catch a
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_35'>35</span>gleam, but they do not seem to understand
-that ideals are not to be had
-cheaply, that a vision is not to be gained
-for the asking. One comes upon men
-and women in every walk of life entirely
-ready to pursue an ideal, but the pursuit
-must impose no difficulty, must involve
-no sacrifice. These are the idealists
-who falter not until sacrifice be demanded
-of them, and then their ideal is
-suffered to pass as if the ideal were
-nothing more than a fair-weather friend
-rather than a refuge in time of trouble,
-a bulwark during hours of trial and
-amid the storms of temptation.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Nor are ideals reserved for the great
-and outstanding in life. Every one of
-us has a goal, and you are what your
-goal is. Your life will ultimately define
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_36'>36</span>itself in the terms of your ideal.
-Let your ideal be high and it will exalt
-you. Suffer your ideal to be low and
-it will be sure to debase you. You are
-your goal: your ideal is you. Life often
-breaks down here, in one of these
-two critical places, in the matter of willing
-highly and of having holily. Some
-men have neither vision of goal nor
-choice of way. Some men have the
-vision but stumble on the way,—the
-men who think the goal more important
-than the way, forgetting that the way is
-the goal. And so many falter and fumble,
-forgetting that life’s most important
-choice is as truly of a path as of the
-goal, that the way that leads thither is
-of the essence of the dream and the
-triumph. What thou wouldst have
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_37'>37</span>highly thou must have holily. We will
-to have high things, but we are not prepared
-to achieve them holily, as if the
-manner of the quest were less holy than
-the matter of the goal.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Who does not know of men in business
-who aim to secure a competence
-and are resolved to put by the ways that
-are sharp and mean, after a fortune has
-been secured? Men vainly imagine that
-after they have amassed much they will
-neutralize the evil they have done by
-doing much good, but in the meantime
-they have done evil to themselves and
-are no longer free to live by the ideal.
-Giving themselves unholily to the quest
-of the high, they have become transformed
-and debased into something
-mean and strange. One knows of men
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_38'>38</span>in the ministry to whom is given the
-putatively wise counsel to be discreetly
-cautious and evasively silent until the
-time comes for the occupancy of a great
-pulpit, when, as it is basely said, a man
-can afford to speak out of his soul. But
-when the great pulpit prize is won, the
-gleam, alas, is gone, the vision lies shattered.
-The man has been corrupted
-and his soul corroded and he who was
-willing for a time to be silent in the
-hope that some day, through the methods
-of silence, he might achieve the
-right of speaking out more bravely, has
-in the meantime become a dumb dog
-who has lost the power as well as the
-will to utter himself in fashion brave
-and unafraid.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Seemingly good men, outwardly decent
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_39'>39</span>men enter into political life and imagine
-that they must for a time strike
-hands with corruption until the hour will
-come when they shall be able to smite
-corruption with their own fists. They
-palter and they falter, whispering sorrowfully,
-“Truly it is regrettable, but
-one must do these things.” One distinguished
-statesman in American life
-declared to a friend many years ago
-that there are times when a man must
-eat a peck of dirt in order to gain high
-office. He gained the office, he ate his
-peck, and the tragedy is that it is not
-only become the steady article of his
-diet, but he loves it and he would not
-live without it, that it is become of the
-very essence of his being.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>In other words, a man cannot wallow
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_40'>40</span>through the mire to the skies. No man
-can have two standards, one to be followed
-until he be forty or fifty, and then
-suddenly put away. No man can divest
-himself of the lower ideal which he has
-adopted as a temporary expedient, because
-in the meantime it has come to
-have the mastery over his soul. Putting
-aside the great choice, the hour
-comes when a man finds himself incapable
-of the great refusal and the standard
-to which he gave his temporary adherence,
-to be abandoned in the years
-of opulence and safety, becomes his despotic
-and inescapable master. It is no
-more possible to have two standards in
-the world of the spirit than it is possible
-to prescribe two different moral standards
-for men and women. Unity must
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_41'>41</span>be sought and achieved at the outset,
-not a lowered standard in the beginning
-and a higher standard in the end. The
-habit of the soul cannot be altered at
-will. Once to every man and not a
-thousand times comes the moment to
-decide, and the earlier decision will in
-part, if not in whole, be determinative
-of every later choice.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>And if, young men and women, there
-were nothing else for which to prepare,
-there is the future, there is the holy calling
-of parenthood to be pursued by most
-of you. Have I not the right to appeal
-to young men and women to-day to remember
-how much or how little they
-can make of their own lives, and may
-we not base such appeal upon the truth
-that they are to be the makers and the
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_42'>42</span>molders of the morrow; that unless
-their lips and lives proclaim the voice of
-God in the soul of man, there will follow
-a little-souled and mean-hearted generation
-instead of a race of great-hearted
-and noble-souled men and women.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>A beautiful passage in an allegory
-recently presented upon the stage tells
-of the song of unborn souls, which are
-dreaming of the parenthood to be their
-lot upon earth and looking forward with
-heavenly joy to the supreme felicity and
-benediction of parenthood. The most
-important duty of youth is to prepare
-with consciousness and consecration for
-life’s highest duty,—the duty of parenthood.
-Shall that future be polluted,
-shall that heritage be befouled? In reminding
-young men and women as I do
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_43'>43</span>that they are the trustees of the morrow,
-that they hold in their keeping the destiny
-of all the future, I am tempted to
-ask a question. What if I were to
-bring a little child before you, some
-beautiful child of a year or two, and
-what if some man sitting in this company
-were to come hither and for some
-unknown reason strike that child:
-would it not be with difficulty that
-we could restrain ourselves from doing
-violence to such a creature? What
-of the men and women committing
-a crime infinitely more hurtful, who
-would not strike a little child, but who,
-none the less, are ready to doom unborn
-generations to a heritage of evil, of
-hurt, of shame? What young man or
-woman will not think upon that?</p>
-
-<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_44'>44</span>A further word should be spoken to
-young women who in every generation
-are standard-bearers, and not only
-standard-bearers but standard-lifters. I
-know it to be true that ofttimes women
-conform to the lower standards which
-men impose upon them. Yet is it true
-that women may be the makers of standards
-if they will, and that, if they consent
-to the lowering of the standards,
-men will readily and, alas, eagerly lapse
-to the lower levels. Will not young
-women understand that, if they suffer
-standards to be lowered, if they for any
-reason yield to the temptation to be
-their poorer, unworthier selves in the
-sight of men, then will they corrupt men,
-then will they in very truth have broken
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_45'>45</span>faith with the moral order which has
-vested womanhood with the supreme
-privilege of exalting standards and by
-the exalting of standards exalting men.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>I have said nothing up to this time
-about the place of God in the life of
-youth. I never feel it my duty to urge
-you to believe in God as if faith in God,
-as if trust in God, as if the acceptance
-of God were a task to be superimposed
-rather than a privilege to be coveted.
-To young men and women I would say
-that the one thing in the world they may
-not omit to do is to leave room for God
-in their lives. But you cannot leave
-room for God if your life be choked
-and clogged with things, and things, and
-things. Leave a place in your life for
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_46'>46</span>the spirit of God and God will find his
-way into your life and lead you to the
-making of a life divine.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Reviewing what has gone before, the
-great thing in life is to map it out in
-youth. Not that one is to refrain from
-venturing upon the uncharted sea but
-that, howsoever daringly one is ready
-to fare forth upon the seas, one may not
-forget the guidance of the stars. It is
-a great thing to venture upon the imperiling
-seas of life without the assurance
-of safety and reward for one’s
-plans and toils. It is a greater thing
-so to fare forth as to come inevitably
-under the direction of the fixed stars in
-the heavens of the spirit divine.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Upon a stained window in the dwelling
-of a noble friend I came upon some
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_47'>47</span>lines which I commend to the soul of
-youth everywhere:</p>
-
-<div class='lg-container-b'>
- <div class='linegroup'>
- <div class='group'>
- <div class='line'>“Climb high</div>
- <div class='line'>Climb far</div>
- <div class='line'>Your goal the sky</div>
- <div class='line'>Your aim the star.”</div>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class='chapter'>
- <span class='pageno' id='Page_48'>48</span>
- <h2 class='c006'>II <br /> <br /> <span class='c007'>MATURITY: HOW TO SERVE AND ACHIEVE</span></h2>
-</div>
-
-<p class='c010'><span class='sc'>Maturity</span>, or the middle period of
-life, is in a sense the largest part of
-life, and is not to be viewed merely as
-the period after youth and before old
-age. It is relative only as all time is
-relative, but it is absolute, too. In
-truth, it is the time of that self-dependence
-which comes with the consciousness
-of power in maturity. It is the very
-body and substance of life and least relative,—for
-youth is its foreshadowing
-and old age the shadow which it casts
-behind. Middle age is not a link between
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_49'>49</span>youth and old age, but that period
-of life to which youth is an approach,—from
-which old age is an exit. Comparing
-life to a bridge, youth and old
-age might be likened to the piers which
-must be builded, but the linking together
-of the piers, the stretching of the cables
-over which the larger part of life’s pilgrimage
-must be made is the task of
-life’s middle period.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Life is so constituted that it were almost
-within the limits of reasonableness
-to urge that life need not pass out of
-the middle stage into old age. Loath
-though one be to enter upon maturity,
-it need never be left behind in return
-for age if it be entered upon in the spirit
-of preparedness. Middle age is hard
-and bitter if youth have been misspent,
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_50'>50</span>if youth have not been the stage of conscious
-preparation for life.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Certain rules have been laid down for
-the governance of youth and the question
-may be asked whether these are
-pertinent to the needs and tasks of middle
-age,—namely the law that one must
-have an ideal by which to live, and that
-one must not merely live by it but up to
-it. As for the rules which are to be
-binding upon the middle period of life,
-who shall venture to prescribe them,
-save that certain things are obviously
-true,—that middle age shall continue
-that which youth initiates, and that there
-shall be no sharp frontier dividing
-youth from that which comes after.
-For middle age is not so much a part of
-life as it is life, and life absolute.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_51'>51</span>Middle age is but a part of the same
-life-long journey which in its early
-stages is youth, which culminates in age.
-And yet in a sense a different type of
-rules and ordinances is applicable to
-every one of the three great periods of
-life. For life is not a journey, even and
-unvarying, over a wide plain. Life
-may best be likened to the ascent of a
-mountain and in turn the descent from
-its summit, and the laws that govern
-life must be variously modified in order
-to meet the needs of the different periods
-along the journey.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>In the early stages, during the hours
-of the ascent, the imperative thing is
-that a man shall not over-tax his
-strength, that he shall not overstrain
-his powers in the initial stages of the
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_52'>52</span>journey, that he shall not attempt too
-much, that he shall not travel at too
-wearying a pace. As man nears the
-summit of the mountain, it becomes
-needful for him to conform to other
-rules. He must not lose the stride, he
-must know how to go on, he must climb
-and climb without succumbing to the
-heat of the day. Once the descent is
-begun, yet other rules apply, if one is
-with safety to reach the end of the long
-journey. The glory of the morning no
-longer upbears him, the splendor of the
-noonday sun no longer maintains his
-strength. But as he leaves youth’s
-vigor and the power of maturity behind
-him, the glow of the passing day may
-irradiate his vision and reveal to him
-the distant horizon.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_53'>53</span>Middle age seems too often a painful
-reluctance to leave youth behind and to
-be a more painful hesitancy in the matter
-of facing the oncoming of age. Unhappily
-for itself, middle age oft combines
-the childishness of immaturity
-with the senescence of post-maturity so
-that it lacks alike the charm of youth
-and the grace of age. Old age that is
-not worthy of reverence is contemptible.
-Not less worthy of contempt is middle
-age, if it have brought from youth
-nothing save youth’s foibles and frailties.
-We not unseldom see—and it is
-always a pitiful spectacle,—men and
-women whose bark of life is unballasted
-by the poise that comes with strength
-and unsteadied by the serenity which
-ought to be the mark of the maturer
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_54'>54</span>period. While men speak of the dignity
-of old age, it is in truth the middle
-age which is in need of dignity, which
-alas it too often lacks.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Men frequently refer to the emptiness
-and the barrenness of old age, when
-it is oftenest middle age that is empty
-and meaningless, for it is the time when
-life’s emptiness is disclosed. It is in
-middle age that men are made to face
-the bitter truth that theirs is not to
-achieve and to serve because they have
-not set up any standards worthy of the
-name, because their goal, such as it is, is
-too immediately accessible, and they cannot
-serve because self, having been their
-very deity, has not suffered them to will
-to serve or to learn how to serve.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>The temptation of middle age is to
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_55'>55</span>yield to the spirit of disenchantment,
-though verily that is oft-times called
-disenchantment which means nothing
-more than the absence of enchantments.
-The temptation of middle age is not so
-much to give up ideals as to realize that
-one is without them. Then men mistake
-their poor plans and plottings, their
-puny purposes for ideals and wonder
-why they have lost that which in truth
-they never had. Men rarely lose
-ideals. Poor, imperfect substitutes for
-ideals are found out and find out their
-owners,—if so they may be named.
-Men are not to fear losing ideals in middle
-age. They are to fear not having
-them in youth so that they cannot hold
-them throughout life.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Middle age depends upon youth, and
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_56'>56</span>its disillusionments are due chiefly to
-the absence of illusions in the time of
-youth. In middle and in old age men
-suddenly discover that they cannot reap
-what in youth they have failed to sow.
-That middle age finds the ideals of
-youth unsatisfying and even unengrossing,
-indicts only youth and not itself,
-shows that the map of life, if drawn at
-all and as drawn in youth, was not ample
-and generous enough to have proved
-sufficing for a lifetime.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Assuming that middle age is less joyous
-than youth, it enjoys one supreme
-satisfaction, or rather reaps one supreme
-compensation, that of the consciousness
-of two powers, two of life’s
-sovereign powers, the power to achieve
-and the power to serve. If youth initiates,
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_57'>57</span>middle age most achieves and
-best serves,—most achieves because it
-is a time of fullness of intellectual
-strength and firmness of moral will; best
-serves because the stains of self have
-been or ought to have been burnt out
-and there is left the capacity of selfless
-enlistment under banners unrelated to
-personal gain or private advantage.
-The middle age that men find bare and
-unsatisfying is in truth that to them who
-have not mastered the two arts of life,
-achieving and serving.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Certain mistakes are not uncommon
-in respect of the interpretation of middle
-age, for example, that it is not the
-period of high initiative. Because
-things are not initiated with dash and
-flare, it is assumed that middle age undertakes
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_58'>58</span>nothing. On the contrary, it
-is then and perhaps only then that things
-are begun and achieved for their own
-sake, that things are really undertaken
-in the consciousness of strength and with
-a capacity for achievement. Moreover,
-while little can be carried into and
-beyond middle age that is not initiated
-in youth, the soul of man has not in the
-middle period forfeited or abandoned
-the power of self-correction and self-redemption.
-It may not be easy,
-neither is it impossible.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Perhaps the supreme rule for middle
-age may be phrased in the fewest of
-words,—<i>don’t stop growing</i>! Physical
-and intellectual maturity are not interchangeable
-terms. The truth is that
-men almost consciously cease to grow,
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_59'>59</span>and even will not to grow at thirty-five
-and forty and forty-five and then proceed
-to wonder why life is so unsatisfying.
-Let men but remember that there
-is no such thing as maturity in life,—if
-maturity mean the cessation of growth,—for
-maturity were followed by post-maturity,
-which is over-ripeness.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Men need never cease to grow and
-mature. Men will either grow up or
-go down. The great and satisfying
-lives are those of men and women who
-grow on and go on until they are cut
-down. When Freeman died, he asked
-that on his gravestone be carved the
-words, “He died learning.” He who
-grows and learns dies not. Continue,
-as long as thou wouldst grow, to learn
-and reason and purpose, nor yet imagine
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_60'>60</span>that life is done when youth is ended.
-Nor let the middle-aged forget that going
-on is not the only possibility. Even
-in middle age a man may reserve for
-himself freedom, freedom of choice,
-freedom to revise life’s foundations,
-freedom to begin anew if so be error
-have been made.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Above all, middle age must not lose
-its admirations, its reverences, its enthusiasms.
-The edge of enthusiasm
-may be dulled with the passing of the
-years,—but the body and substance of
-one’s admirations need not be diminished,
-and by our admirations we live.
-Anatole France, speaking of the old
-campaigners of the Reserve, uses this
-finely stimulating word with regard to
-them,—“they unite the elasticity of
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_61'>61</span>youth with the staunchness of maturity.”
-There is another and an older way of
-describing the characteristic quality of
-middle age, which must combine “the
-wisdom of age and the heart of youth.”</p>
-
-<div class='chapter'>
- <span class='pageno' id='Page_62'>62</span>
- <h2 class='c006'>III <br /> <br /> <span class='c007'>AGE: HOW NOT TO GROW OLD</span></h2>
-</div>
-
-<div class='lg-container-l c008'>
- <div class='linegroup'>
- <div class='group'>
- <div class='line'>“But why, you ask me, should this tale be told</div>
- <div class='line'>To men grown old, or who are growing old?</div>
- <div class='line'>It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late</div>
- <div class='line'>Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.</div>
- </div>
- <div class='group'>
- <div class='line'><hr class="hrpoem" /></div>
- </div>
- <div class='group'>
- <div class='line'>What, then? Shall we sit idly down and say</div>
- <div class='line'>The night hath come; it is no longer day?</div>
- <div class='line'>The night hath not yet come; we are not quite</div>
- <div class='line'>Cut off from labor by the failing light;</div>
- <div class='line'>Something remains for us to do or dare;</div>
- <div class='line'>Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear.</div>
- </div>
- <div class='group'>
- <div class='line'><hr class="hrpoem" /></div>
- </div>
- <div class='group'>
- <div class='line'>For age is opportunity no less</div>
- <div class='line'>Than youth itself, though in another dress,</div>
- <div class='line'>And as the evening twilight fades away</div>
- <div class='line'>The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”</div>
- </div>
- <div class='group'>
- <div class='line in2'>—<span class='sc'>Longfellow</span>: <i>Morituri Salutamus</i>.</div>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<p class='c010'><span class='pageno' id='Page_63'>63</span><span class='sc'>Old</span> age depends largely upon the attitude
-of men toward the whole of life.
-Old age is not a joke nor a bore nor a
-trial nor a calamity, though it may be
-any one of these as all of life may be.
-But what needs to be stressed is that old
-age has no content in itself apart from
-the whole of life. Old age may be as
-nothing else a foretaste of the kingdom
-of heaven where faith and hope may
-meet and love crown all. But little can
-come to old age that was not in and
-throughout life. Alas for the old age
-of the self-centered and self-serving!
-If life have built walls that shut out,
-these cannot be razed by age, which will
-forever have made itself captive.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>The crown of old age is a term that
-trips lightly from our tongues. Are we
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_64'>64</span>not in danger of forgetting that there
-must be something to crown? For in
-old age inheres no magic to redeem and
-transfigures all that has gone before.
-Old age purges the precious metal of
-life’s substance of its debasing dross,
-but the precious substance must be there
-to be purged. Age, like happiness, is
-neither to be sought nor evaded. It is
-a by-product of life rather than life’s
-end. Not the aim nor goal of life, but
-the way of life must it be.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>In the matter of reverencing old age,
-we rest historically upon the firmest
-Jewish foundation. For the Jew as no
-other man before or after him taught
-the world how to magnify childhood
-and to glorify old age,—to rise up before
-the hoary head and honor the face
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_65'>65</span>of the old man. And this revering solicitude
-for the aged is still one of the
-marks of Jewish life. Jewish teaching
-has urged and Jewish practice has confirmed
-the truth that blessing rests upon
-that home in which the aged have found
-shelter.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Indeed, one is almost disposed to hold
-that there is a possibility of overdoing
-reverence for old age as old age, of becoming
-indiscriminating in the honor
-which one metes out to the hoary head.
-If the people of Israel have erred in
-any part with respect to old age, they
-have revered the aged head too much
-irrespective of the head and the man.
-I would not if I could break with that
-fine tradition, but, sometimes, it were
-well to ask whether old age is to be respected
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_66'>66</span>as a virtue in itself, whether
-length of days should be regarded as a
-merit apart from what has gone before.
-Old age is judged compassionately on
-the principle that nothing but the good
-should be spoken touching the dead or
-the nearly dead.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>One is sometimes moved to believe
-that if the aged are unhappy it is because
-age brings with it not only opportunity
-for quiet meditation and serene
-retrospect, but the necessity of thinking
-about the great issues of life. And
-many of us have never learned how to
-think. We have put off the evil day of
-taking thought upon life so that, when
-it at last comes, its imminence appalls.
-Men and women put off their questions
-and their problems to the end of life
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_67'>67</span>and when the end is nearly come, they
-lack the strength and will to think them
-through. The need of solutions is then
-cruelly pressed upon unpracticed and
-undisciplined minds.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Though I ask the question, how to
-grow old and how not to grow old, are
-we not, if we will be frank, more
-interested in the question how not to grow
-old than how to grow old? In the
-question, pressing a little farther, how
-to seem not to grow old rather than how
-not grow old? Seeming not to grow
-old may be attained by artificial means.
-Not to grow old may be achieved by
-inward grace alone. Need it be said
-that no one is ever deceived by external
-methods of averting age, nor is any one
-profited or helped save perhaps the
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_68'>68</span>chemist and the dye-maker, save the
-babblers and praters of new substitutes
-for old faiths? Whosoever thinks of
-old age aright, whosoever has fitted
-himself for the dignity of the burden of
-many days will resort neither to renewing
-cosmetics nor novel cults as a refuge
-from old age.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Men speak of the penalties of old
-age and penalties there are, but what of
-its rewards, rich and abundant and
-wondrous, richer indeed in most cases
-than its desert? The old, because they
-are old, are treated for the most part
-as if they were travelers returning
-richly laden with stores of varied
-treasures from a voyage over remotest
-seas to some strange and wondrous spot.
-Old age in itself is no more a reward
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_69'>69</span>than a penalty. And yet what rewards,
-paraphrasing Shakespeare, accompany
-old age, and how fitting that these rewards,
-friendship-bearing, honor-bringing,
-should wait upon what might elsewise
-be life’s melancholy end!</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>The truth is that old age is not a
-period of rewards nor penalties in themselves.
-It is a time of duties, as every
-period offers life’s cup with duties
-brimming o’er. Duties there are,—but
-there are privileges beyond estimate.
-And the privilege of privileges is to offer
-an example to others in all ways and
-most of all in the way of facing life
-with serenity. Finer far for old age to
-claim its duties than to enjoy its privileges
-for the old ought to shun being
-pitied as weak and seek rather to be admired
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_70'>70</span>as strong and honored as
-serene.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>When old age has the grace of exalting
-duty and subordinating privilege,
-it ceases to be the period of mute resignation.
-From one point of view, it is
-the age of resignation, for one wittingly
-resigns in part what death is wholly to
-take away, but, be it made clear, resignation
-is not inaction, renunciation is not
-willlessly surrendering torpor. These
-things imply will, action, choice, not
-merely an awaiting of the end without
-murmur or complaint. For old age
-waits not but wills; old age surrenders
-not but whilst life is renders return for
-life.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>While different types of laws seem to
-obtain for youth, maturity and old age,
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_71'>71</span>these yet are one and one spirit seems
-to pervade and dominate all. Let
-youth hold high its aim and pursue high
-aims through holy means. Let maturity
-serve and achieve and above all
-achieve only that it may serve with
-unimpaired admiration and undimmed
-ideals. And let old age be nobly wise
-and unafraid and unselfish to the end!</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Much, if not everything, of the content
-of old age depends on the things for
-which one cares. If one care for the
-things that cannot survive youth or middle
-age, whose value is inevitably lessened
-with the flight of years, then old
-age must become barren and empty.
-Whether your old age is to be void and
-meaningless depends almost wholly not
-upon what you have and care for at
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_72'>72</span>seventy or eighty, but what it was you
-sought to have at twenty, what you
-cared for at thirty, what you cherished
-at forty. Certain things may be harmless,
-even admirable in themselves, and
-yet are destined to be woefully disappointing
-if they are suffered to become
-the pursuits of a lifetime and men give
-themselves to things for which they cannot
-care when the years have multiplied.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Myopia may interfere with one’s zest
-for looking upon motion pictures, limbs
-may become too rheumatic for dancing,
-tragic though this may sound, the hazard
-of games of chance may lose its
-fascination, even money-making, the
-accumulation of things, may pall or become
-impossible. But certain things
-there are that can never grow stale nor
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_73'>73</span>wearying nor seem unprofitable. Upon
-these let men fix their vision and their
-aim, the pleasures of the mind, the tasks
-of the spirit, the possibilities of serving.
-It is almost life’s greatest danger that
-life will be lived with care for things
-interest in which cannot survive youth
-and middle age. What if a man were
-so to train himself physically that he
-could run and do nothing else, so that
-after the period of running had passed,
-he could not walk! Would not such
-modus vivendi seem unwise and sadly
-blundering?</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Would you avoid growing old? Do
-you will even to seem not to grow old?
-Then have a vision of life and amid a
-multiplicity of things have and hold,
-cherish and pursue an ideal. To the
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_74'>74</span>man of ideals, to the man who in other
-words lives, age comes not. Age cannot
-touch nor wither nor blast the life
-pervaded and smitten through by ideals.
-Would you grow old, or rather would
-you not grow old, then live, and live by
-the stars. Such are the lives of the
-unaging. In order not to grow old, I
-say again, grow on in faith and hopefulness,
-in vision and serviceableness.
-Being without these things, some men
-cannot grow old, they are old. Unhappily
-for them, they were born old, as
-other men, whatever be the number of
-their years, die young. Having these
-things, age cannot ravage the spirit.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Such men and women are age-proof,
-their heads may be silver white, their
-frames bowed, their limbs palsied, but
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_75'>75</span>age they know not,—the men I have in
-mind, such men as that great physician
-who, after sixty years and more of
-unwearied and unrivaled service, is still
-an impassioned pleader for the right of
-the child, of the merest, puniest babe.
-Who will dare say that he is aged, who
-at fourscore and more spends himself
-utterly in the service of the least of
-these? I am thinking of yet another
-friend of fourscore and more, whose
-life is nobly dedicated to the furtherance
-of amity between faith and faith, who
-serves all men as brothers, who proves
-that he is a Christian by the love he
-bears the Jew. And I am thinking of
-yet another man who likewise has lived
-for fourscore years, perhaps the foremost
-educator of our generation, a publicist
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_76'>76</span>of matchless felicity in utterance
-and conduct alike, a man who at eighty
-and more steps into the arena with all
-the power and eagerness of youth in
-order to take up arms on behalf of another
-great though much wronged servant
-of the nation.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>It was once said of Theodore Parker
-that he gave himself unreservedly and
-with abandon to whatever truth, duty,
-love, the three sublime voices of God,—the
-real trinity in our souls,—commanded.
-Truth, duty, love! Have
-you tried these things? Have you
-dared to live by them and for them, by
-and for any one of them? Does not
-this word bear out what was recently
-said by a great American physician
-about a noble social worker,—that individual,
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_77'>77</span>who has no object in life, who
-simply works day by day, with the idea
-that he is making a dollar and is going
-to use the dollar for his own comfort,
-cannot have a very peaceful mind. But
-if one has an object in life, to attain
-certain things which will be helpful to
-others, and whose day is filled with that
-sort of work, that individual deserves,—and
-other things being equal,—will
-have an old age.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Truth, duty, love,—obey their command
-and when you do you shall find
-age a fiction and life alone a reality.
-What if old age be without teeth and
-eyes if it be not without hope and faith
-and fadeless memories!</p>
-
-<div class='lg-container-b'>
- <div class='linegroup'>
- <div class='group'>
- <div class='line in2'>“To suffer and endure,</div>
- <div class='line in2'>To keep the spirit pure—</div>
- <div class='line'><span class='pageno' id='Page_78'>78</span>The fortress and abode of holy Truth—</div>
- <div class='line in2'>To serve eternal things</div>
- <div class='line in2'>Whate’er the issue brings</div>
- <div class='line'>This is not broken Age, but ageless Youth.”</div>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<p class='c009'>If then life be centered on self, old
-age may rest in the certitude of
-disappointment and disillusion. But if self
-be centered on life, then may come what
-Morley described, touching Edmund
-Burke, as “an unrebellious temper and
-hopes undimmed for mankind.”</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Twofold must be the hope of man,—for
-a future for self and for the future
-for all. And when the soul is so
-freighted with hopes, then shall it be
-said of a man as it was said of the great
-poet: “He was one of those on the
-lookout for every new idea and for
-every old idea with a new application,
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_79'>79</span>which may tend to meet the growing requirements
-of society; one of those who
-are like men standing on a watch-tower
-to whom others apply and say, not
-‘What of the night?’ but ‘What of the
-morning and of the coming day?’”</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>My one word of counsel is,—let life
-not be centered on self, for to live for
-self is to invite cruel disaster in old age.
-The saddest, in truth the most tragic,
-lives I know are those of old men and
-women who have nothing to live for because
-they have lived for self and self
-alone,—and self is nothing. Their
-lives are piteously empty. For the
-restlessness and excitement of youth
-may hide this truth, but age, like death,
-is a revealer. And there are many
-types of selfishness. I speak of two
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_80'>80</span>which must suffice. There are those
-who live for self,—for selfissimus, giving
-not the utmost for the highest but
-all for the nighest,—self, self, self,
-self’s pleasure and profit and power and
-vantage and fame. These are the most
-crude and obvious types of the selfful,
-who shall pay the penalty of their folly
-and their moral disease.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>But, though it be said to your dismay,
-there are other types of selfishness,
-though less obvious,—the selfishness of
-those who project self into and magnify
-self in family relationship. For there
-are those who simply extend the horizon
-of self enough to include other forms of
-self, one’s own, one’s nearest, one’s flesh
-and blood. And here, too, disillusion
-is bound to come and ought to come, for
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_81'>81</span>one’s own cannot and ought not to fill
-one’s life forever. One might well excuse
-our mothers and fathers for giving
-their thought and attention to their own,
-for these were many and life was hard
-and life’s struggle ofttimes bitter. But
-for the fewest is such excuse valid now,—if
-ever it was valid—especially seeing
-that we concentrate upon the giving
-to others of things rather than upon
-helping others to their highest and best.
-In truth, people concentrate upon self,
-upon their own interests and wishes, and
-these things pass and little or nothing
-is left in life save self. Live for yourself,
-and you live two years in one; live
-in the life of others, and you divide your
-years with another.</p>
-
-<p class='c009'>Is not all this a paraphrase of what
-<span class='pageno' id='Page_82'>82</span>Emerson has said better than any other?
-He who loves is in no condition old.
-Not lives and lives for self, not loves
-self and self alone, but he who loves!
-Emerson, building better perhaps than
-he knew, has voiced the deepest truth of
-the soul. Love cannot die and love will
-not let die nor yet grow old. And yet
-as a final word, and more needed than
-all else, I would say that there is only
-one way to grow old, and that too is the
-only way not to grow old. That way is
-to know, to love, to serve.</p>
-
-<div class='lg-container-b'>
- <div class='linegroup'>
- <div class='group'>
- <div class='line'>“Grow old along with me!</div>
- <div class='line'>The Best is yet to be,</div>
- <div class='line'>The last of life for which the first was made;</div>
- <div class='line'>Our times are in His hand</div>
- <div class='line'>Who saith, ‘A whole I planned,’</div>
- <div class='line'>Youth shows but half: Trust God: see all nor be afraid.”</div>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
-
-
-
-
-
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