cruelty, the injustice, and the pain that may be your lot in the world,--that which will make your motives habitually great and honorable, and light up in an instant a thousand noble disdains at the very thought of meanness and of fraud?”
“Character before wealth,” was the motto of our Boston merchant Amos Lawrence, who inscribed on his pocketbook, “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
“Do you know, sir,” asked a devotee of Mammon, in speaking to John Bright, “that I am worth a million sterling?” “Yes,” said the irritated but calm-spirited respondent, “I do; and I know that it is all you are worth.”
“Life is constantly weighing us in very sensitive scales,” says Lowell, “and telling every one of us to precisely what his real weight is, to the last grain of dust.”
“I ought not to allow any man, because he has broad lands, to feel that he is rich in my presence,” says Emerson. “I ought to make him feel that I can do without his riches, that I cannot be bought,--neither by comfort, neither by pride,--and although I be utterly penniless, and receiving bread from him, that he is the poor man beside me.”
“What do we mean,” asked Henry Ward Beecher, “when we say that a man ‘is made’? Is it that he has got the control of his lower instincts, so that they are only fuel to his higher feelings, giving force to his nature? That his affections are like vines, sending out on all sides blossoms and clustering fruits? That his tastes are so cultivated that all beautiful things speak to him, and bring him their delights? That his understanding is opened, so that he walks through every hall of knowledge, and gathers its treasures? That his moral feelings are so developed and quickened that he holds sweet commerce with Heaven? Oh, no—none of these things. He is cold and dead in heart, and mind, and soul. Only his passions are alive; but—he is worth five hundred thousand dollars!
“And we say a man is ‘ruined.’ Are his wife and children dead? Oh, no. Have they had a quarrel, and are they separated from him? Oh, no. Has he lost his reputation through crime? No. Is his reason gone? Oh, no; it is as sound as ever. Is he struck through with disease? No. He has lost his property, and he is ruined. The man ruined! When shall we learn that ‘a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth’?”
A bankrupt merchant, returning home one night, said to his noble wife, “My dear, I am ruined; everything we have is in the hands of the sheriff.” After a few moments of silence the wife looked into his face and asked, “Will the sheriff sell you?” “Oh, no.” “Will the sheriff sell me?” “Oh, no.” “Will he sell the children?” “Oh, no.” “Then do not say that we have lost everything. All that is the most valuable remains to us,--manhood, womanhood, childhood. We have lost but the results of our skill and industry. We can make another fortune if our hearts and hands are left us.”
What power can poverty have over a home where loving hearts are beating with a consciousness of untold riches of head and heart?
A rich mind and noble spirit will cast over the humblest home a radiance of beauty which the upholsterer and decorator can never approach. Who would not prefer to be a millionaire of character, of contentment, rather than possess nothing but the vulgar coins of a Croesus? Whoever uplifts civilization is rich though he die penniless; and future generations will erect his monument.
Some men are rich in health, in constant cheerfulness, in a mercurial temperament which floats them over troubles and trials enough to sink a shipload of ordinary men. Others are rich in disposition, family, and friends. There are some men so amiable that they carry an atmosphere of jollity about them. Some are rich in integrity and character.
What are the toil-sweated productions of wealth piled up in vast profusion around a Girard, or a Rothschild, when weighed against the stores of wisdom, the treasures of knowledge, and the strength, beauty, and glory with which victorious virtue has enriched and adorned a great multitude of minds during the march of a hundred generations?
Phillips Brooks, Whittier, Thoreau, Audubon, Emerson, Beecher, Agassiz, were rich without money. They saw the splendor in the flower, the glory in the grass, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. They knew that the man who owns the landscape is seldom the one who pays the taxes on it. They sucked in power and wealth at first hand from the meadows and fields, birds, brooks, mountains, and forests, as the bee sucks honey from the flowers. Every natural object seemed to bring them a special message from the great Author of the beautiful. To such rare souls every natural object is touched with power and beauty; and their thirsty souls drink it in as a traveler on a desert drinks in the God-sent water of the oasis. To extract power and spiritual wealth from the world around them seems to be their mission, and to pour it out again in refreshing showers upon a thirsting humanity.
“What is the measure of a nation’s true success?” asked Lowell. “It is the amount of energy it has contributed to the thought, the moral energy, the intellectual happiness, the spiritual hope and consolation of mankind.”
Thrift.
All this has been said as to the nature of true wealth, after first of all assuming that every human being has been trained in early life (when irrevocable habits are formed) in the fundamental laws of thrift; daily labor; earning a fair means of living; saving enough for pecuniary independence in days of sickness and old age; avoidance of debt; readiness to help others; and all those wholesome divine rules of frugal self-preservation that are to be as rigidly learned and obeyed as the ten commandments—six days for labor and a life without theft or a lie or covetousness.
Assuming all this, one of the first great lessons in life is to learn the true estimate of values. As the youth starts out in his career all sorts of wares will be imposed upon him, and all kinds of temptations will be used to induce him to buy. His success will depend very largely upon his ability to estimate properly, not the apparent but the real value of everything presented to him. Vulgar wealth will flaunt her banner before his eyes, and claim supremacy over everything else. A thousand schemes will thrust their claims into his face. Every occupation and vocation will present its charms. The youth who would succeed must not allow himself to be deceived, but place emphasis of life where it belongs.
Is it any wonder that our children start out with wrong ideals of life, with wrong ideas of what constitutes success? The child is “urged to get on,” to “rise in the world,” to “make money.” success? The child is “urged to get on,” to “rise in the world,” to “make money.” Yet one of the great lessons to teach in this century of sharp competition and the survival of the fittest is how to be rich without money, and to learn how to do without what is popularly and falsely called success.
“I believe,” says Julia Ward Howe, “that many of our youth are learning that a worthy life is the best success; whether it is attended by wealth or poverty, or by that most preferable condition of all, a modest competency. Pure, upright living and steady devotion to principle are the surest foundations of any success worth having.”
“No success in life,” says Frances E. Willard, “is anything but and absolute failure, unless its purpose is to increase the sum of human good and happiness.”
All honor to the comparative few in every walk of life who, amid the strong materialistic tendencies of our age, still speak and act earnestly, inspired by the hope of rewards other than gold or popular favor! These are our truly great men and women. They labor in their ordinary vocations with no less zeal because they give time and thought to higher things.
“A man may as soon fill a chest with grace, or a vessel with virtue,” says Phillips Brooks, “as a heart with wealth.”
“If you would know
