to strike any false blows which might mar the angel that sleeps in the stone; for the image we produce must represent our life-work. Whether it is beautiful or hideous, divine or brutal, it must stand as an expression of ourselves, as representing our ideals.
It always pains me to see a young person approaching his life-work with carelessness and indifference, as though it did not make much difference to him how he did his work if he only got through with it and got his pay for it. How little the average youth realizes the sacredness, the dignity, the divinity of his calling!
There is a higher meaning, something broader, deeper, and nobler in a vocation than making a living or seeking fame. Making a life is the best thing in it. It should be a man-developer, a character-builder, and a great life school for broadening, deepening, and rounding into symmetry, harmony, and beauty all the God-given faculties within us.
The part of our life-work which gives us a living, which provides the bread and butter and clothes and houses and shelter, is merely incidental to the great disciplinary, educative phase of it—the self-unfoldment. It is a question of how large and how grand a man or woman you can bring out of your vocation, not how much money there is in it.
Your life-work is your statue. You cannot get away from it. It is beautiful or hideous, lovely or ugly, inspiring or debasing, as you make it. It will elevate or degrade. You can no more get away from it than you can, of your own volition, rise from the earth.
Every errand you do, every letter you write, every piece of merchandise you sell, every conversation, every thought of yours—everything you do or think is a blow of the chisel which mars or beautifies the statue.
The attitude of mind with which we perform our life-work colors the whole career and determines the quality of the destiny. It is the lofty ideal that redeems the life from the curse of commonness, and imparts a touch of nobility to every calling. But a low, sordid aim will take the dignity out of any occupation.
Chapter VII.
Responsibility Develops Power
THERE is enough latent force in a Maximite torpedo shell to tear a warship to pieces. But the amount of force or explosive power in one of these terrific engines of destruction could never be ascertained by any ordinary concussion.
Children could play with it for years, pound it, roll it about, and do all sorts of things with it; the shell might be shot through the walls of an ordinary building, without arousing its terrible dynamic energy. It must be fired from a cannon, with terrific force, through a foot or so of steel plate armor, before it meets with resistance great enough to evoke its mighty explosive power.
Every man is a stranger to his greatest strength, his mightiest power, until the test of a great responsibility, a critical emergency, or a supreme crisis in his life, calls it out.
Work on a farm, hauling wood, working in a tannery, storekeeping, West Point, the Mexican War, doing odd jobs about town, were not enough to arouse the sleeping giant in General Grant. There is no probability that he would ever have been heard from outside of his own little community but for the emergency of the Civil War.
There was a tremendous dynamic force in the man, but it required the concussion of the great Civil War to ignite it. No ordinary occasion touched his slumbering power, no ordinary experience could ignite the powder in this giant. Under common circumstances he would have gone through life a stranger to his own ability, just as most of the great dynamite shells now in existence will probably never be exploded because of the lack of a war emergency great enough to explode them.
Farming, wood-chopping, rail-splitting, surveying, storekeeping, the state legislature, the practice of law, not even the United States Congress, furnished occasions great enough, resistance strong enough, to ignite the spark of power, to explode the dynamic force in Abraham Lincoln. Only the responsibility of a nation in imminent peril furnished sufficient concussion to ignite the giant powder in perhaps the greatest man that ever trod the American Continent.
There is no probability that Lincoln would have gone down in history as a very great man but for the crisis of the Civil War. The nation’s peril was the responsibility thrust upon him which brought out the last ounce of his reserves, his latent power of achievement, the resources which he never would have dreamed he possessed but for this emergency.
Some of the greatest men in history never discovered themselves until they lost everything but their pluck and grit, or until some great misfortune overtook them and they were driven to desperation to invent a way out of their dilemma.
Giants are made in the stern school of necessity. The strong, vigorous, forceful, stalwart men who have pushed civilization upward are the products of self-help. They have not been pushed or boosted; but they have fought every inch of the way up to their own loaf.
They are giants because they have been great conquerors of difficulties, supreme masters of difficult situations. They have acquired the strength of the obstacles which they have overcome.
Many of our giant business men never got a glimpse of their real power until some great panic or misfortune swept their property away and knocked the crutches out from under them. Many men and women never discovered their ability until everything they thought would help them to success had been taken away from them; until they had been stripped of everything that they held dear in life. Our greatest power, our highest possibility, lies so deep in our natures that it often takes a tremendous emergency, a powerful crisis, to call it out. It is only when we feel that all bridges behind us are burned, all retreat cut off, and that we have no outside aid to lean upon, that we discover our full inherent power. As long as we get outside help we never know our own resources. How many young men and young women owe their success to some great misfortune, which cut off a competence—the death of a relative, the loss of business or home, or some other great calamity, which threw them on their own resources and compelled them to fight for themselves!
Responsibility is a great power developer. Where there is responsibility there is growth. People who are never thrust into responsible positions never develop their real strength. This is one reason why it is so rare to find very strong men and women among those who have spent their lives in subordinate positions, in the service of others. They go through life comparative weaklings because their powers have never been tested or developed by having great responsibility thrust upon them. Their thinking has been done for them. They have simply carried out somebody else’s programme. They have never learned to stand alone, to think for themselves, to act independently. Because they have never been obliged to plan for themselves, they have never developed the best things in them,—their power of originality, inventiveness, initiative, independence, self-reliance, their possible grit and stamina. The power to create, to make combinations, to meet emergencies, the power which comes from continuous marshaling of one’s forces to meet difficult situations, to adjust means to ends, that stamina or power which makes one equal to the great crisis in the life of a nation, is only developed by years of practical training under great responsibility.
There is nothing more misleading than the philosophy that if there is anything in a youth it will come out. It may come out, and it may not. It depends largely upon circumstances, upon the presence or absence of an ambition-arousing, a grit-awakening environment The greatest ability is not always accompanied by the greatest confidence or the greatest ambition.
There is at this moment enough power latent in the clerks or ordinary employees in almost any of our business houses to manage them as well as, or better than they are being managed to-day, if the opportunity and necessary emergency to call
