Chapter IX.

       Cultivating the Growth of Man-Timber

       Table of Contents

      God give us men. A time like this demands

      Strong minds, great hearts, true faith, and ready hands:

      Men whom the lust of office does not kill;

      Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;

      Men who possess opinions and a will;

      Men who have honor—men who will not lie;

      Men who can stand before a demagogue

      And scorn his treacherous flatteries without winking;

      Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog

      I public duty, and in private thinking.

      All the world cries, “Where is the man who will save us? We want a man!” Don’t look so far for this man. You have him at hand. This man—it is you, it is I; it is each one of us! . . . How to constitute one’s self a man? Nothing harder, if one knows not how to will it; nothing easier, if one wills it.

      –Alexander Dumas

      As there is nothing in the world great but man, there is nothing truly great in man but character. –W.M. Evarts

      Life is a leaf of paper white,

      Whereon each one of us may write

      His word or two, and then comes night.

      Greatly begin! Though thou have time

      But for a line, be that sublime,--

      Not failure, but low aim, is crime. –Lowell

      And I smiled to think God’s greatness

      Flowed around my incompleteness;

      Round my restlessness, his rest. –Mrs. Browning

      “Character is everything,” said Charles Sumner, when upon his dying bed.

      “First of all,” said President Garfield, when a boy, “I must make myself a man; if I do not succeed in that I can succeed in nothing.”

      “According to the order of nature, men being equal, their common vocation is the profession of humanity,” says Rousseau, in his celebrated essay on Education. “And whoever is well educated to discharge the duty of a man cannot be badly prepared to fill any of those offices that have a relation to him. It matters little to me whether my pupil be designed for the army, the pulpit, or the bar. Nature has destined us to the offices of human life, antecedent to our destination concerning society. To live is the profession I would teach him. When I have done with him, it is true he will be neither a soldier, a lawyer, nor a divine. LET HIM FIRST BE A MAN. Fortune may remove him from one rank to another as she pleases; he will be always found in his place.”

      We are, therefore, to remember, as Dr. Moxon has told us, that the main business of life is not to do, but to become; and that action itself has its finest and most enduring fruit in character.

      John Stuart Mill has put this matter clearly: “The character itself should be to the individual a paramount end, simply because the existence of this ideal nobleness of character, or of a near approach to it, in any abundance, would go further than all things else toward making human life happy, both in the comparatively humble sense of pleasure and freedom from pain, and in the higher meaning of rendering life not what it now is, almost universally puerile and insignificant, but such as every human being with highly developed faculties would desire to have.”

      And this, says Mill, every man is to work at: “Though our character is formed by circumstances, our own desires can do much to shape those circumstances; and what is really inspiriting and ennobling in the doctrine of free will is the conviction that we have real power over the formation of our own character; our will, by influencing some of our circumstances, being able to modify our future habits or capacities of willing.”

      How is character made up, except by our choices and our refusals? We select from life what we choose. We resemble insects which assume the color of the leaves and plants they feed upon, for sooner or later we become like the food of our minds, like the creatures that live in our hearts. Every act of our lives, every word, every association, is written with an iron pen upon the very texture of our being.

      “There is dew in one flower and not in another,” said Beecher, “because one opens its cup and takes it in, while the other closes itself and the drop runs off.”

      What will our future be but what we make it? Our purpose will give it character. One’s resolution is one’s prophecy. There is no bright hope, no great outlook, for the man who is not inspired by a stalwart purpose, which alone is the true interpreter of his manhood.

      “There is not in the lowest depths of our hearts,” said Robertson of Brighton, “a mere desire for happiness, but a craving, as natural to us as the desire for food—the craving for nobler, higher life.” To satisfy this craving is good business to be in.

      If a youth were to start out in the world with the fixed determination that he will make no statement but the exact truth; that every promise shall be redeemed to the letter; that every appointment shall be kept with the strictest faithfulness, and with sacred regard for other men’s time; if he should hold his reputation as a priceless treasure, and feel that the eyes of the world are upon him, that he must not deviate a hair’s breadth from the truth and right—if he should take such a stand at the outset—he would come to have the almost unlimited confidence of mankind.

      What we are to be really, we are now potentially. As the future oak lies folded in the acorn, so in the present lies our future. Our success will be, can be, but a natural tree, developed from the seed of our own sowing; the fragrance of its blossoms and the richness of its fruitage will depend upon nourishment absorbed from our past and present.

      The first requisite of all education and discipline should be MAN-TIMBER. Tough timber must come from well-grown, sturdy trees. Such wood can be turned into a mast, can be fashioned into a piano, or an exquisite carving. But it must become timber first. Time and patience develop the sapling into the tree. So, through discipline, education, experience, the sapling child is developed into hardy mental, moral, physical timber. The only real success worthy of the name is that which comes from a consciousness of growing wider, deeper, higher, in mental and moral power, as the years go on. To feel the faculties expanding and unfolding—this is the only life worth living.

      And is not all this inspiration in response to a Divine touch