Love, Life Work | Page 8

the local
managers.
Revivals are for the revivalists, and some fine morning these revival
towns will arise, rub their sleepy eyes, and Chapman will be but a bad
taste in the mouth, and Sunday, Chaeffer, Torrey, Biederwolf and
Company, a troubled dream. To preach hagiology to civilized people is
a lapse that Nemesis will not overlook. America stands for the
Twentieth Century, and if in a moment of weakness she slips back to
the exuberant folly of the frenzied piety of the Sixteenth, she must pay
the penalty. Two things man will have to do--get free from the bondage
of other men; and second, liberate himself from the phantoms of his
own mind. On neither of these points does the revivalist help or aid in
any way. Effervescence is not character and every debauch must be
paid for in vitality and self-respect.
All formal organized religions through which the promoters and
managers thrive are bad, but some are worse than others. The more
superstition a religion has, the worse it is. Usually religions are made
up of morality and superstition. Pure superstition alone would be
revolting--in our day it would attract nobody--so the idea is introduced
that morality and religion are inseparable. I am against the men who
pretend to believe that ethics without a fetich is vain and useless.
The preachers who preach the beauty of truth, honesty and a useful,
helpful life, I am with, head, heart and hand.
The preachers who declare that there can be no such thing as a beautiful
life unless it will accept superstition, I am against, tooth, claw, club,

tongue and pen. Down with the Infamy! I prophesy a day when
business and education will be synonymous--when commerce and
college will join hands--when the preparation for life will be to go to
work.
As long as trade was trickery, business barter, commerce finesse,
government exploitation, slaughter honorable, and murder a fine art;
when religion was ignorant superstition, piety the worship of a fetich
and education a clutch for honors, there was small hope for the race.
Under these conditions everything tended towards division, dissipation,
disintegration, separation--darkness, death.
But with the supremacy gained by science, the introduction of the
one-price system in business, and the gradually growing conviction that
honesty is man's most valuable asset, we behold light at the end of the
tunnel.
It only remains now for the laity to drive conviction home upon the
clergy, and prove to them that pretence has its penalty, and to bring to
the mourners' bench that trinity of offenders, somewhat ironically
designated as the Three Learned Professions, and mankind will be well
out upon the broad highway, the towering domes of the Ideal City in
sight.

One-Man Power
Every successful concern is the result of a One-Man Power.
Coöperation, technically, is an iridescent dream--things coöperate
because the man makes them. He cements them by his will.
But find this Man, and get his confidence, and his weary eyes will look
into yours and the cry of his heart shall echo in your ears. "O, for some
one to help me bear this burden!"
Then he will tell you of his endless search for Ability, and of his
continual disappointments and thwartings in trying to get some one to
help himself by helping him.
Ability is the one crying need of the hour. The banks are bulging with
money, and everywhere are men looking for work. The harvest is ripe.
But the Ability to captain the unemployed and utilize the capital, is
lacking--sadly lacking. In every city there are many five- and
ten-thousand-dollar-a-year positions to be filled, but the only applicants
are men who want jobs at fifteen dollars a week. Your man of Ability

has a place already. Yes, Ability is a rare article.
But there is something that is much scarcer, something finer far,
something rarer than this quality of Ability.
It is the ability to recognize Ability.
The sternest comment that ever can be made against employers as a
class, lies in the fact that men of Ability usually succeed in showing
their worth in spite of their employer, and not with his assistance and
encouragement.
If you know the lives of men of Ability, you know that they discovered
their power, almost without exception, thru chance or accident. Had the
accident not occurred that made the opportunity, the man would have
remained unknown and practically lost to the world. The experience of
Tom Potter, telegraph operator at an obscure little way station, is truth
painted large. That fearful night, when most of the wires were down
and a passenger train went through the bridge, gave Tom Potter the
opportunity of discovering himself. He took charge of the dead, cared
for the wounded, settled fifty claims--drawing drafts on the
company--burned the last vestige