The University of Hard Knocks | Page 5

way of pictures and discussions of these
truths. Here is bulk as well as nutriment.
If you get the feeling that the first personal pronoun is being
overworked, I remind you that this is more a confession than a lecture.
You cannot confess without referring to the confesser.

To Everybody in My Audience
I like you because I am like you.
I believe in you because I believe in myself. We are all one family. I
believe in your Inside, not in your Outside, whoever you are, whatever
you are, wherever you are.
I believe in the Angel of Good inside every block of human marble. I
believe it must be carved out in The University of Hard Knocks.
I believe all this pride, vanity, selfishness, self-righteousness, hypocrisy

and human frailty are the Outside that must be chipped away.
I believe the Hard Knocks cannot injure the Angel, but can only reveal
it.
I hope you are getting your Hard Knocks.
I care little about your glorious or inglorious past. I care little about
your present. I care much about your future for that is to see more of
the Angel in you.

The University of Hard Knocks

Chapter I
The Books Are Bumps
THE greatest school is the University of Hard Knocks. Its books are
bumps.
Every bump is a lesson. If we learn the lesson with one bump, we do
not get that bump again. We do not need it. We have traveled past it.
They do not waste the bumps. We get promoted to the next bump.
But if we are "naturally bright," or there is something else the matter
with us, so that we do not learn the lesson of the bump we have just
gotten, then that bump must come back and bump us again.
Some of us learn to go forward with a few bumps, but most of us are
"naturally bright" and have to be pulverized.
The tuition in the University of Hard Knocks is not free. Experience is
the dearest teacher in the world. Most of us spend our lives in the
A-B-C's of getting started.
We matriculate in the cradle.
We never graduate. When we stop learning we are due for another
bump.
There are two kinds of people--wise people and fools. The fools are the
people who think they have graduated.

The playground is all of God's universe.
The university colors are black and blue.
The yell is "ouch" repeated ad lib.

The Need of the Bumps
When I was thirteen I knew a great deal more than I do now. There was
a sentence in my grammar that disgusted me. It was by some foreigner
I had never met. His name was Shakespeare. It was this:
"Sweet are the uses of adversity; Which, like the toad, ugly and
venomous, Wears yet a priceless jewel in its head; And thus our life,
exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in running
brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything."
"Tongues in trees," I thought. "Trees can't talk! That man is crazy.
Books in running brooks! Why nobody never puts no books in no
running brooks. They'd get wet. And that sermons in stones! They get
preachers to preach sermons, and they build houses out of stones."
I was sorry for Shakespeare--when I was thirteen.
But I am happy today that I have traveled a little farther. I am happy
that I have begun to learn the lessons from the bumps. I am happy that I
am learning the sweet tho painful lessons of the University of
Adversity. I am happy that I am beginning to listen. For as I learn to
listen, I hear every tree speaking, every stone preaching and every
running brook the unfolding of a book.

Children, I fear you will not be greatly interested in what is to follow.
Perhaps you are "naturally bright" and feel sorry for Shakespeare.
I was not interested when father and mother told me these things. I
knew they meant all right, but the world had moved since they were
young, and now two and two made seven, because we lived so much
faster.
It is so hard to tell young people anything. They know better. So they
have to get bumped just where we got bumped, to learn that two and
two always makes four, and "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he
also reap."

But if you will remember some of these things, they will feel like
poultices by and by when the bumps come.

The Two Colleges
As we get bumped and battered on life's pathway, we discover we get
two kinds of bumps--bumps that we need and bumps that we do not
need.
Bumps that we bump into and bumps that bump into