The Call of the Twentieth Century | Page 8

nor will its rewards be found alone in the life to come. The world of to- day will not be a "vale of tears" through which sinful men are to walk unhappily toward final reward. It will be a world of light and color and joy, a world in which each of us may have a noble though a humble part,--the work of the "holy life of action." It will find religion in love and wisdom and virtue, not in bloodless asceticism, philosophical disputation, the maintenance of withered creeds, the cultivation of fruitless emotion, or the recrudescence of forms from which the life has gone out. It is possible, Thoreau tells us, for us to "walk in hallowed cathedrals," and this in our every-day lives of profession or trade. It is the loyalty to duty, the love of God through the love of men, which may transform the workshop to a cathedral, and the life of to-day may be divine none the less because it is strenuous and complex. It may be all the more so because it is democratic, even the Sabbath and its duties being no longer exalted above the other holy days.
What sort of men does the century need for all this work it has to do? We may be sure that it will choose its own, and those who cannot serve it will be cast aside unpityingly. Those it can use it will pay generously, each after its kind, some with money, some with fame, some with the sense of power, some with the joy of service. Some will work hard in spite of vast wealth, some only after taking the vow of poverty.
Those not needed you can find any day. They lean against lamp-posts in platoons, they crowd the saloons, they stand about railway stations all day long to see trains go by. They dally on the lounges of fashionable clubs. They may be had tied in bundles by the employers of menial labor. Their women work at the wash-tubs, and crowd the sweat shops of great cities; or, idle rich, they may dawdle in the various ways in which men and women dispose of time, yielding nothing in return for it. You, whom the century wants, belong to none of these classes. Yours must be the spirit of the times, strenuous, complex, democratic.
A young man is a mighty reservoir of unused power. "Give me health and a day and I will put the pomp of emperors to shame." If I save my strength and make the most of it, there is scarcely a limit to what I may do. The right kind of men using their strength rightly, far outrun their own ambitions, not as to wealth and fame and position, but as to actual accomplishment. "I never dreamed that I should do so much," is the frequent saying of a successful man; for all men are ready to help him who throws his whole soul into the service.
Men of training the century must demand. It is impossible to drop into greatness. "There is always room at the top." so the Chicago merchant said to his son, "but the elevator is not running." You must walk up the stairs on your own feet. It is as easy to do great things as small, if you only know how. The only way to learn to do great things is to do small things well, patiently, loyally. If your ambitions run high, it will take a long time in preparation. There is no hurry. No wise man begrudges any of the time spent in the preparation for life, so long as it is actually making ready.
"Profligacy," says Emerson, "consists not in spending, but in spending off the line of your career. The crime which bankrupts men and nations is that of turning aside from one's main purpose to serve a job here and there."
The value of the college training of to-day cannot be too strongly emphasized. You cannot save time nor money by omitting it, whatever the profession on which you enter. The college is becoming a part of life. For a long time the American college was swayed by the traditions of the English aristocracy. Its purpose was to certify to a man's personal culture. The young man was sent to college that he might be a member of a gentler caste. His degree was his badge that in his youth he had done the proper thing for a gentleman to do. It attested not that he was wise or good or competent to serve, but that he was bred a gentleman among gentlemen.
So long as the title of academic bachelor had this significance, the man of action passed it by. It had no meaning to him, and the fine edge of accuracy in thought