Young Men and In Business

Power of Character: How You May Assert It

Although it is perfectly true that we may so exalt our importance as individuals as to feed self-conceit; although as a rule men think they have more talents than they really possess, it is nevertheless certain that there is not one man in ten who makes the most of himself for the purpose for which he was created. The great waste of life is wasted or perverted power. What noble youths come out of schools and colleges; how few afterwards make their lives noble. With what opportunities do many enter upon business and professions, and afterwards sink into the grave with scarcely a trace to indicate that they ever lived. There have been hundreds who could have rivalled the patriotism of Hampden, or the humanity of Howard, or the eloquence of Chatham, and who have left behind them no one memorial of their existence. It is recorded that a fellow-student once said to Paley: “You are a great fool to waste your best years in the dissipations of a university; you have talents for something better.” To multitudes of gifted young men has the like thing been said, but said in vain. Paley took the hint, which was roughly given. And now “there is no name in the English church that stands higher than his, and no name in the vast circles of English literature that has a more permanent fame.”

The great things of this world have been accomplished by individuals. Vast social reformations have originated in individual souls. Truths that now sway the world were first proclaimed by individual lips. Great thoughts, that now are the axioms of humanity, proceeded from the centre of individual hearts. No warlike host delivered the children of Israel from the bondage of Egypt, but one man—Moses. No senate of statesmen raised Israel to a pitch of greatness that proclaimed a theocratic nation to the world, but one man—David. No school of divines gave to England the Bible in the mother tongue, but one man—Wyckliffe. No learned society discovered America, but one man—Columbus. No association of science revealed the clue to interpret the laws of the universe, but one man—Galileo. No parliament saved English liberties, but one man—Pym. No assembly of theologians wrote the book, which nest to the Bible has had the most potent influence on the English language and on English hearts, but one man—John Bunyan. No confederate nations rescued Scotland from her distracted councils, from her political and ecclesiastical enemies, but one man—Knox. No chambers of commerce taught Europe to abolish the restrictions of trade, but one man—Richard Cobden. Doubtless these men found their coadjutors; but all through the ages God has put immense honor upon individuals.

Young man, do not let others fashion what your life shall be. Thomas Carlyle says somewhere that he would like to stop the stream of people in the Strand, and ask every man his history. But, “No,” says the sage, “I will not stop them. If I did, I should find they were like a flock of sheep following in the track of one another.” Alas, men begin to lose their individuality of conviction the moment they step into the world. Here is a young man beginning life’s business. He feels, as he starts, an impulse to be pure and noble. He is surrounded by clerks in an office. A fortnight passes, and one evening, when he is hurrying home after office hours, he hears a fast young man whisper at the desk, “Poor fellow, he’s off to be pinned to his mother’s knee.” Now, what would be the right thing for that youth to do? To say at once, “Yes, and God forbid I should ever forget what I owe to my mother.” Let him say this, and the insulter would be shamed, if shame were not dead. He would respect the self-assertion of his fellow-clerk. Does the new-comer say this? No; his ears turn red; his face is suffused with a blush; and in a night or two the poor weak one dares some trick of folly to show his independence, and to prove that home influences do not bind him. Thus, alas!—how shall I say it sorrowfully enough?—thus he makes a sacrifice of his individuality on the altar that a profligate clerk has built up for him; and then, step by step, he weaves around himself the bonds of pleasure, till, amid the dark storm of shipwrecked character, blasted reputation, wrung hearts at home, worn-out health, and miserable self-reproaches, he sinks to his unhonored grave, leaving only a memory of disgrace to those who have loved him.

I have known many a young man who has seen the right path as plain as noonday. God has mercifully flashed clear conviction of duty upon him. No mental mistake has hindered him. His judgment has been convinced; his feelings have been moved; he has felt sure that it would be better for him, for this life and for the nest, to take a decided position on the side of God and righteousness. And what has hindered him? What has led to waste and self-remorse? Has he been persuaded by the wise? Has he been reasoned out of his convictions by the influential? No; he has been moved by the jeer of a dandy or the sneer of the coquette; he has quenched his conviction before the mocking taunt of some empty-brained street lounger; has lowered his own high tone of morals lest he should seem singular in the little circle of worldly society surrounding him. Do you say, “Can a man set himself against society?” If society quenches the true in you, if it binds you, if it robs you of moral manhood, if it makes you its slave, there can remain no question to you as to what is your duty. Scorn to degrade yourself by yielding up your individuality to suit the whim of, it may be, the worthless and vulgar.

You are stepping into life, where you will find thousands who became vicious because they never formed the resolve to live nobly. Such men are the dead leaves that fall upon the stream and flow, not by any vital power or aim in themselves, but by the eddying current around them. There is many a sot who is imbruted, because he never determined that he would not be a drunkard. There is many a useless one who has become a cipher, because he never resolved to give to his life a meaning. There is many a filthy blasphemer who is profane, because he never resolved that the foul oath should not soil his lips. There is many a defiled, polluted, and diseased one, because he never resolved that he would not be the companion of a whore. This is the sorrowfulest of all things—men ruined, sinking into sin, vulgarity, uselessness, vileness, not because they intended to be bad, but because they had not the courage to resolve to be good.

It is yet more deeply to be lamented that the young men who are thus ruined are mostly the open, the generous, and the frank. A cold nature that no one cares for, that is not wanted in the drinking-room, or smoking-room, or billiard-room, passes into manhood without hurt; but good-natured and gleeful young men have a weak side whereby they become a prey to the dissipated. They are companionable and sympathetic, therefore miscreants suck them by temptation.

It would be grateful to our feelings if this compromise of individual character were confined to the men who disregard the claims of virtue. It is by no means so. A philosophic statesman, J. Stuart Mill, in his Essay on Liberty, complains that no period of England’s history has been so little marked by individual originality and force as our own. Certainly, whether we look upon the merely moral or the professedly religious circles of our country, we find everywhere the tendency to sink the man in the crowd, the Christian in the church. This shifting of personal responsibility from the one to the many is the secret alike of national and of individual ineffectiveness. Only look around you, and you will see hundreds who might assert for themselves, and for the cause of truth and philanthropy, a position of dignity and power, who are hindered by the maxims and habits of others.

There is a prevailing impression that it is women, with their quick sensibilities, who are the most susceptible to the influences of fashion and opinion. It admits of question whether this prevailing weakness in our days is not on the side of young men. They do not so much make manifest their subserviency, but it is not the less deteriorating and real. Take a few examples.

Here, in a select neighborhood, is a young man who affects style. A place in the omnibus would fit his limited means. But no; the omnibus is all very well for men whose position is made, and for young fellows who have no standing in society; but for him, a horse and groom must form a part of his appointments. So he burdens himself, or speculates, or runs into debt, that horse or “trap” may be at command. And thus he, who by manly independence, and an expenditure according with his circumstances, could have risen to be honored and esteemed, shrinks away at length into some lower neighborhood, or drags out a vexed and discontented life, because he has forgotten the honor which he might have commanded at the outset, had he lived out his honest conviction and not made himself a mere imitator.

Or take other cases. Yon beardless youth must smoke the, to him, nauseous cigar or meerschaum, because “Tom Grandeur” struts down High-street, looking large behind his curling smoke. Nay, “My Lord Meek,” who cares no more for a hunt or race than the most refined and timid lady, enlarges his stables, buys a fine stud, makes up his book for the St. Leger; or, with a sore heart, joins the “throw off,” caring not a whit for the brush, but very much that he may not be outdone in his equipage or establishment. All through society this abnegation of individuality weaves its web. Nor is the effect circumscribed to the frivolous and weak. Men think in cliques. It is intolerable to some to be out of fashion with the political opinion of their set. Never was contradiction so contemptible as that into which they are betrayed. It would be ludicrous, were it not too serious an indication of the want of principle. One month you hear men denouncing a political opinion and its prominent advocates, with all the vituperative energy of which their nature is capable. The next month, forsooth, they have adopted that precise opinion, and eagerly rush to share some leaf of the laurel which they hope will fall upon them through the tergiversation of their party.

You have, alas, the same thing among so-called religious men. Many a young man has powers which would bless the church and the world, but for his maudlin regard for what others may think of him. He is, it may be, a young man whose father’s religiousness gave him universal sway in his town or neighborhood. No workman but honored him; no cottager but felt the sweetness of his sympathy. The son of this great and good man is thrown among Ritualists. This is the religious fashion of the hour, and therefore it fascinates him. He adopts it, not because he is convinced of its truth, but because it suits what he deems his “æsthetic taste.” Deplorably ignorant of the past struggles of English history, he is gratified with the crowded churches in which he can witness this pictorial religion of waving censers, purple-robed priests, and picturesque altar arrangements. He falls into the cant of saying that Protestantism is “unsymbolical.” The white-robed choristers and lighted candles respond to what he terms the “holy symbols” of the faith. He begins now to think the religion that made his home a very paradise, his wise father a man of power, and his mother saintly, is a very vulgar thing, and only inculcated by unlettered men and unauthorized teachers. And thus the poor soul excuses himself from the demands of personal exertion and personal fidelity to conscience; loses himself in the easy externalisms or poetic dreamings which secure him the favor of sentimental pastors, and the smiles of young ladies with pendant crosses on their breasts. It is pitiable, but it is also sad, to think what ineffectiveness of life comes to a young man who, instead of being the dupe of weaklings, might have allied himself with the grandest of Englishmen, and left behind him records of abiding influence.

There is no circle where a man can escape this peril of being unduly swayed by others. Many well-principled young men, who are free from the follies I have glanced at, lose their power to influence through a deplorable lack of force. Instead of quickness, briskness, strength, in the warehouse, they do their work in a dreamy, sentimental way. Their religious coterie is composed of people who are slow, sedate, and lack vigor. They are taught to think that religion consists in unctuous prayers, sanctimonious looks, effusive utterances, instead of a consistent filling up of duty, care for their employers’ interest, and faithful discharge of daily tasks. Oh, do not forget it is the action, it is the life in the very sphere which God has appointed, that is the opportunity for the manifestation of religion. All mere emotion is like the steam from the engine—of no value except as an indication of ability to work.

There is another danger. You will find a class of religious men not at all sentimental, but who will sneer at what they term religious earnestness. A young man’s worst enemies are often cold, formal, routine Christians—Christians who think that to stand well with the world, to get into “good society,” to be always very respectable, and to have as little cross-bearing as possible, is the golden mean of religious life. Young men, in the name of all that is true and noble, set yourselves against this style of religious profession. The worst weakness in the world is to fear to do a right thing because others will criticise it.

There were many Christian men in Wittemberg who said to Martin Luther, “You don’t mean that you are going to hang up these theses on the church door.” “Yes,” said Luther; “they are true; they assail damning error; my fatherland is bowing down to antichrist.” “Pause,” said the men who would stand well with everybody. “Is not this zeal without knowledge? Think how you will scandalize the University; how you will drive off men who would follow you in a more discreet course.” “Avaunt!” said the reformer. “The people are perishing in ignorance. The crowds of the common people who come into the city to market will read these words. Yours is not discretion, but cowardice.” He did the deed; and as the result of that act, Europe received the Protestant Reformation, and the night of the middle ages was ended.

On one occasion, Nehemiah was urged by his friends to desert the post of duty, to conceal himself in the courts of the Temple, for fear of would-be assassins. With heroic decision, he replied, “Should such a man as I flee? And who is there that, being as I am, would go into the temple to save his life? I will not go in.” Brave, perfumed words!

During the mighty struggle for West Indian emancipation, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton was about to divide the House of Commons; his friends appealed to him not to divide. They came one by one, sat down by his side, urged and implored him not to divide; ministers of the crown besought him to give way. In the whole House there was only one who hoped and prayed that he would be true to the cause of the slave, and that one was his daughter in the gallery. He was true to the cause of humanity; and that division, Lord Althorp declared, decided the question of emancipation. The question was next introduced before the House as a Cabinet measure.

There went from Manchester to the British parliament, about twenty-five years ago, a comparatively young man. He went up to London from a conference of ministers of religion who had assembled to secure cheap bread for the people. That conference had been satirized; not a solitary ecclesiastical dignitary had ventured to be present; the leading journal had attempted to cover it with ridicule. That young senator ventured to defend the conference before a crowded House of Commons. His reference was hailed with contemptuous laughter; the greatest statesman of the day rebuked him. Observe! that young man lived to receive an apology from that statesman, to hear him introduce the measure which had been so unpopular, and to receive himself the designation which his name will bear through all coming times, “The Apostle of Free-trade.”

I say, where you feel that you are right, be true to yourself; do not take your cue from other men. They may be weak, or prejudiced, or trimmers, or cowards. Why should you lose your individuality for them?

“Oh, blessed is he to whom is given
  The instinct that can tell,
That God is on the field when He
  Is most invisible.

“And blessed is he who can divine
  Where real right doth lie,
And dares to take the side that seems
  Wrong to man’s blinded eye.

“Oh, learn to scorn the praise of men;
  Oh, learn to live with God;
For Jesus won the world through shame,
  And beckons thee his road.

“God’s glory is a wondrous thing,
  Most strange in all its ways;
And of all things on earth, least like
  What men agree to praise.

“For right is right, since God is God,
  And right the day must win;
To doubt would be disloyalty,
  To falter would be sin.”

To make full assertion, therefore, of your personal character, let me ask you to bear in mind these counsels:

1. Do not tamper with convictions. God in mercy sends you luminous hours. He is the pitying Friend of your soul, and is constantly persuading it to a higher life. I am quite sure that you cannot pass into manhood without heavenly visitations. Do not, I implore, neglect these visitations. Do not quiet your conscience by a subterfuge. Do not hold the performance of a clear duty in suspense.

Behold a scene of which history tells us. There are two men standing face to face in a Roman court in a maritime city. The one is a young king, his beautiful queen by his side. There is all the pomp and circumstance of station. Chief captains and principal men fill the royal court. Waiting servitors surround the doors, and an eager multitude fill the avenues. The other is an unattended, unbefriended prisoner, with a chain upon his hand. That prisoner tells of a solemn moment when heaven flashed conviction upon his path. He reasons with resistless logic and eloquence in proof of the truth of Christianity. The young king listens—is moved; it is not merely the prisoner that stands face to face with him, but God himself; and his convicted conscience cries out, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian!” The assembly breaks up. The king is alone in his chamber, and muses: “I become a Christian—the member of a despised sect! There is clearly truth in what I have heard; but for me to be a Christian, what will the world think of me? My interest and pleasures forbid it.” The subject is dismissed, and we have not the faintest intimation that another opportunity of salvation ever again visited that man. He followed his race in the pursuit of ambition and vice; he gradually lost influence and power; his days became troubled and disastrous, and his name remains, like other Herods, unhonored and disgraced. What of that other man—that unbefriended prisoner? He is the foremost man in the world for all after times. One excepted, no name is repeated among men so often as his. His life is the life of Christendom in these ages, and will be more and more. He has done more for truth, righteousness, and human salvation, than any other sinful mortal in all ages of the world. What was the secret of this majesty of influence? He told it in that court. When heaven had flashed conviction upon his path, he did not allow pleasure nor prejudice nor interest nor public opinion to sway him. These are his words: “I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.”

My friend, it has been to many a man a dreadful struggle to repent and turn to God. There have been temptations formidable, and a vacillation of the heart most perilous. But no man can be excused from the conflict. A young man, who became one of the most devoted and constant Christians, was accustomed to insist upon decision, decision, decision, to every young man whom he addressed. Said he, “If you expect God to help you, you must be perfectly decided.”

2. Guard against the temptations of the times. Far be it from me to utter a word that would debar you from the recreations and excitements appropriate to your age. Joy and cheerfulness are your strength and heritage. Monkish austerity and sanctimoniousness are rarely virtues. But our modern civilization has multiplied, under the name of pleasure, the facilities of vice. The perils that assail young men in great cities are so many, so seductive, and so ruinous to body and soul, as to make an observer tremble. If, then, you would be obedient to the heavenly teaching, you must resolutely resolve not to “go in the way of evil men.” There was a time in England when places of business were homes. The employer admitted young men to the domestic sanctities of his family. They received aid from him in the formation of acquaintances, and had even access to his own circles of recreation. Now, young men in cities can scarcely be said to have a home. Some have not even the privilege of a common room, or a fire in their chamber. They are open, therefore, to every allurement that promises pleasure. Places of business, moreover, are huge establishments where the loose moralist can cover vice by self-deceivableness, and where the subtle infidel, the scoffer, and the licentious mingle together. Religion is ridiculed, and the clergy spoken of with a sneer. Filthy books are sold and circulated—books of infamy, which minister to the vilest tastes, which taint and befoul the imagination with unclean images, and which a man can no more look at without defilement than he can touch soft pitch and be clean.

Alas, wherever a young man turns for worldly amusement he meets danger. Large towns swarm with brilliantly lighted saloons, which hold out their meretricious attractions. There is the drama, music, and art. It was ascertained that in two hours one evening, six hundred young men entered one music hall in London. Were these rooms harmless, he would be an enemy to human happiness who objected to them. If they are demoralizing and ruinous to the health and character of the inexperienced, he is a friend who points this out. It is little suspected how women with bedizened head-dresses and flaunty robes are holding the last shred of their modesty; how married men hide under white waistcoats polluted hearts; how, while “gray hairs dance, devils laugh and angels weep;” how bankrupts wear forced smiles, and the wretched try their poor jokes; how the victims of disease and death hide their ghastliness by flowers, and light their rapid progress to the grave by flaring gas-light. It is little known how thousands of young men from the religious homes of Scotland and Wales pass into a speedy oblivion after their feet have once crossed the threshold of these rooms in English cities. Alas, what a tale might be told of fathers’ hairs whitened, mothers’ hearts crushed, sisters’ eyes swollen with tears, over sons once the pride of their homes. If you would be pure, then, you must avoid these places. They will speedily prejudice you against religion. They will turn your doubts into blank unbelief and atheism. They will quench in you even the desire for immortality. They will turn into terror or scoffing every restraining influence. And what help can there then be for you for this world or for the next?

3. Have faith in the significance of your life. There is no exaggeration when a living writer says: “If there were the smallest star in heaven that had no place to fill, the oversight would beget a disturbance which no Leverrier could compute. One grain of sand, that did not fall into its place, would disturb, or even fatally disorder the whole scheme of the heavenly motions. Every particle of air has its appointed place, and serves its appointed end.” God, dear young man, means something by you. Yours may not be the highest, but there is some high work which you may fulfil. The low grass-tuft is not the branching cedar towering for centuries on Lebanon; nor is it the fragrant orange-blossom, which is plucked to deck the bridal wreath; but neither the orange-blossom nor cedar could render the service of that lowly grass-tuft. In sacred converse with your Maker, breathe the prayer, in this the formative period of your existence: “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? Why have I an existence among these living souls of this creation? Why hast thou given me these grand and awful endowments of thought, reason, intelligence, speech? I look round on the universe, and see all creatures fulfilling their appointed service. I see the sun filling the whole hemisphere from day to day with his light and heat. I see at night the stars lighting up the arch of the firmament, each keeping his appointed place, the silent preacher of obedience to thy will. I see the bird that balances its pinions on the air, testifying of thy goodness. I learn that the tiny invisible insect is answering its purpose in preserving the salubrity of the atmosphere and the purity of the water. I find every fragrant violet of the hedgerow and every shock of corn fulfilling a mission of serving. I learn from thy word of the higher spirits that dwell in thy presence, that they have their appointed work; that angels are ministering spirits, and do thy commandments, hearkening to the voice of thy word; and as I thus behold a universe where each has its appointed place, I utter the prayer more earnestly, “What is the meaning of my life, Father of spirits? I share thy counsels; reveal thy thought respecting me.” Deeply am I convinced, my brother, that if with some such prayer you enter upon this period of your life, your existence wall prove no meaningless thing; it will be instinct with influence, and will have an end to which you will come with unutterable rapture.

I have in the foregoing considerations helped to answer the question how you may assert the power of your personal character. I by no means say that you should disparage associations. The most useless men are those who will never combine. Exaggerated individuality makes a man impracticable, and sometimes insupportable. On the other hand, our modern danger lies in another direction. It is so to shape ourselves by others as to destroy force and effectiveness.

Gibbon tells us a tragic history, which has been more amply narrated by Count Montalembert in his “Monks of the West.” The gladiatorial games of Rome were continued until the beginning of the sixth century of our era. They had turned a civilized people into savage cannibals. There, in that enormous amphitheatre, whose tiers rising above tiers remain to this day, tens of thousands of spectators looked down on the bloody spectacle, and thousands of victims were slaughtered. A holy man in the East heard of the deeds of blood. The fire of a righteous indignation seized him. He travelled to Rome; arrived there as the imperial games were being celebrated. His soul burned against the cruelty and the impiety. He entered the Colosseum; burst through the waves of the people all palpitating with ferocious curiosity. He threw himself between the gladiators engaged in the sanguinary combat. In the name of the God of heaven he commanded them to cease their murderous strife. The pagan multitude were for a moment panic-stricken with the holy audacity of the Christian. Then they cried out; they rose on him; they tore up the arches; stones hissed around him; the gladiators completed the work of death. But the blood of the martyr was the last shed in that arena. The horrid custom, which had so long resisted the voice of humanity, ended with that testimony. The nobleness of the sacrifice showed the horror of the abuse. The emperor Honorius proscribed the games of the gladiators, and they have never been revived.

Without any such sacrifice you may learn from it the might of a simple act of decision for truth and conscience, and that by such noble deeds your life may have immortal issues. Where the timid will start back in fear, there you may bless the coming ages. The achievements of duty have been grander than those of the warrior. Wordsworth says of duty:

“Flowers laugh before her in their beds,
And fragrance in her footsteps treads:
She does preserve the stars from wrong,
And the eternal heavens through her are fresh and strong.”

At the beginning of manhood you stand now; a few years, and you will stand at the end. The span is brief; the earthly life is only one. These lines are written for your sake alone. No interest can another have in your living a noble life that is comparable to the interest you have in yourself. If you find at the end of life that you have made a grand mistake, it will be a mistake you never can undo. Soon the shadows will flee, and men will be judged, not by the earthly standard, but by what they have been and have done. Sometimes when bales of merchandise leave England for a colonial port, the price put upon them there is very different from that they had here. So when you have gone through the gates of death, the angels will not ask how you stood with this world; but they will estimate you by your fidelity, your sympathies, the consecration of your life to chat which was true and good. Alone you will go into that eternity, as alone you came into existence. Alone will you tread the path to the throne of God; alone you will be judged; alone will your opportunities come up in review; alone will you carry through eternity the results of the one earthly life you have lived. Said a noble youth, who lived long enough to fulfil high promise: “I shall die as an individual; I shall be judged as an individual: I am resolved, therefore, to live as an individual.” It is just this purpose to which, in God’s name, I summon you in this address. Let it be so, my brother. Take thy place with the illustrious ones of all times who have lived to bless the world. Pass on to manhood and to immortality with the seal of God upon thy brow. And then, when death has done its mission, disenthralled of flesh, thou shalt rise to the unobstructed sphere where hinderance never comes, and where thou shalt begin an illimitable work. There, with thy life grafted upon the infinite, it will be fruitful as no earthly life can be.