64 THE RELIGION OF MODERATION. In all this I see no cause for despondency. The special error of young ambitions is that they think nothing is well done unless it is done on a large scale. They fancy that everybody must play Hamlet; though what would become of Hamlet if there were no Ghost, no Horatio, no Laertes? And, indeed, if you study Shakespeare's play, you will soon see that nothing could be made out of it if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were omitted. My contention is that it is better to play Rosencrantz well than to play Hamlet badly. It is more honourable to make a boot that will keep out water, and fit the foot easily, and approve itself a good honest piece of workmanship, than to write a bad poem. "They also serve who only stand and wait."1 Do not trouble yourself about your social rank or your particular lot in life, but whatever that rank or lot, strive to adorn it by the exercise of the manly virtues and the graces of the Christian character. Let moderation govern your aims and restrain your desires; and the work which comes to you as manifestly yours, the work which you are conscious you can undertake without undue strain, will acquire a new and just importance both in your own eyes and the eyes of your fellow-men. Be moderate, and as you yourself wisely refrain from attempting that which lies beyond your strength, be careful not to expect too much from others. Be just even to generosity and generous even to justice. Learn, finally, to control your temper. It is well to glow with sacred indignation at the sight of wrong, fraud, or oppression; but it is wasteful and imprudent to be at a white heat at all things and all times. Be angry and sin not. A calm, equable temper facilitates work; it is a sign that a man's intellect as well as his heart is in the right place. Who are we that we should expend our irritability upon others? Some persons bristle all over, like a porcupine, with prickles and points; touch them where or how you will, you are sure to wound your fingers. Learn to deal calmly with men and manners; take the accidents of life as they come, patiently and without complaint. Let nothing ruffle you out of that equanimity which is based on a sense of duty and a belief in an overruling Providence. To bear and forbear is half the philosophy of life, and to a strong man there is no difficulty in it. The meanest, poorest life may be made noble and beautiful by investing it with the sweet serenity of patience. 1 Or, as Robert Browning has it : "All service ranks the same with God: If now, as formerly He trod Paradise, His presence fills Our earth, each only as God wills Can work-God's puppets, best and worst CHAPTER IV. CONDUCT. HE world judges us by our conduct; it has neither the time nor the inclination to study our character; moreover, it assumes that our conduct is necessarily the reflex of our character. Now, it by no means follows that a man's actions are always a fair or certain indication of his judgment, his passions, or his opinions; frequently they exaggerate or belie them, but we cannot stop to appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober. We take him as he is, and determine what he is from what he does. So that if he desiderate a lenient or favourable criticism, he will shape his course accordingly. The criticism that deals in generalisations, and does not condescend to particulars, must always be imperfect and often will be unjust; yet I do not see that from society at large any other can reasonably be expected. One cannot ask that it should analyse motives or make subtle allowance for circumstances. If it see Lothario bespattered with mud, it concludes he has been in the gutter. When Prince Hal keeps company with Falstaff and Bardolph, it seems natural enough that "the soul of every man prophetically doth forethink his fall." He may console himself privately with the thought that he imitates the sun in permitting "the base contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world," so that he may win the greater admiration when he at last breaks through "the foul and ugly mists of vapours that did seem to strangle him;" but meanwhile the world sees only the clouds, and does not believe in the sunshine. No; we must all of us keep a guard on our conduct. We may refuse a slavish deference to Mrs. Grundy, and yet feel that it is impolitic to supply her with the material of calumny. Youth is apt to presume too much on the innocence of its intentions; it must be careful that its doings are innocent, are incapable of being misconstrued. Again, youth is prone to consider it a high and brave thing to defy the world; will talk finely about its scorn of conventionalities; will pour out eloquent dithyrambs in advocacy and applause of individual freedom. But, as Mill shows us, the liberty of the few must not be exercised in encroachment upon the rights of E 66 WHAT TRUe self-culture will do for us. the many; liberty when limited to the few degenerates too often into license-into the liberty to take liberties with other people's liberties. The laws of society are designed to ensure the harmonious relations of its members; and a little reflection will show that by rebelling against them a man has little, if anything, to gain, and much to lose. Eccentricities of conduct are as annoying, if not as objectionable, as more violent excesses; and there is really nothing to be said in defence of them. It may be, and is, very foolish for Oxford undergraduates at Commemorations to howl down an intruder with a white hat, but why did the man wear it? Selden wisely says:-"He that will keep a monkey should pay for the glasses he breaks." And he who violates the laws and accepted traditions of society must endure the consequences. There will be little to cavil at in the conduct of the student who accepts and acts upon the ideal of self-culture expounded in these pages. For, as it includes the education of the heart as well as the training of the intellect, it provides for a fair and seemly discharge of the duties which life brings with it. We have already seen what it would make of him as son and brother-what it would make of him in his daily vocation-with what kind of aim and purpose it would inspire him :-"To preserve in his home the graceful order of pure and peaceful affections; to omit in the world no delicate attention of friendship; to forget not the claims of poverty and ignorance and sin to the compassion of all who would be faithful to their kind;" this, and to nurture and confirm those high faculties which God has given him as a trust, is its determinate object. "We are often the last," says James Martineau, to see how noble are our opportunities, to feel how inspiring the voices that call us to high duties and productive sacrifice; and while we loiter on in the track of drowsy habit, esteeming our lot common and profane, better hearts are looking on, burning within them to stand on the spot where we stand, to seize its hopes, and be true to all its sacredness." But self-culture, rightly understood, will rouse us to a sense of our opportunities, will open our ears to the voices of inspiration, so that our conduct of life shall become that of a Christian gentleman, conscious of the responsibilities both of the present and the future :— 66 "At tibi juventus, at tibi immortalitas : Tibi parta divum est vita. Periment mutuis Tu cuncta rerum quassa, cuncta naufraga, Looking forward with a hope so large and glorious, the student will be encouraged to live for God and his fellow-men. He will be constantly rising, and helping others to rise, in virtue and in knowledge, in benevolence and in religion. He will love, and not be ashamed to own that he loves, whatever is pure, beautiful, ETHICS OF DAILY CONDUCT. 67 honest, of good report. He will respond to the appeal of the highest poetry, the purest art, the most consummate science. He will carry a devout enthusiasm into his daily life, so that it shall elevate his thoughts, sanctify his feelings, consecrate his industry. His moral and religious duties he will approach in a humble, reverend, unassuming spirit, making no pharisaic vaunt of superior righteousness, but firmly clinging to religion as the sole sure basis of morality, and seeing in the nature of man and the things of the universe the omnipresent benevolence and wisdom of God. And in thus developing the ideal of self-culture and striving like a true man to live nobly, he will find his strength and support in prayer, in constant communion with that Father in heaven whose inspiration is constant, who ceases not to work within us so long as we consent to will and to do His good pleasure. Without prayer self-culture must be a sham and a mockery, for around this central idea of loving, trustful intercourse with God it revolves like a planetary system round its sun. Coming down to secular and everyday matters, I am myself aware that certain rules of conduct might easily be prescribed for the student; but I have preferred to indicate the general principles which underlie the proper aims and work of life, and to leave to each reader the several applications of them. The young man who has seriously taken up the great task of selfculture can hardly be less willing than myself to believe in the advantages of punctuality and industry, less convinced than myself of the evils of negligence and procrastination. Let us advance a little farther. And this seems to be of special importance that on the threshold of his career, while still lingering in the porch, the student should learn the positive value or efficiency of Money. It is a knowledge that some of us gain only after a bitter experience, when the shore is strewn with shattered hopes and wrecked ambitions. As Lord Palmerston said of dirt that it was matter in the wrong place, so it may be said of money that it is dirt in the right place, when its acquisition and distribution are governed by high sentiments of honour and becomingness. All our generous scorn of avarice, all our just contempt for men who make money the prize and goal of their restless and insatiate endeavour, who test even virtue and knowledge by what they will fetch in the market, must not blind us to its usefulness, nor put us out of conceit with the law that a labourer is worthy of his hire. Young somewhere speaks of "the wretched impotence of gold." Well, there are many things for and in which it is powerless, but not the less does it contain what Dr. Johnson would have called "a potentiality" of good. It can bring strength to the feeble and relief to the oppressed; it can kindle a smile on the orphan's cheek, and dry the tears in the widow's aching eyes. Use it, but not abuse it. Keep it, as Swift says, in your head, but not in your heart. Some young men display a fine carelessness in deal 68 TAKE CARE OF THe pounds. ing with it, a lordly indifference, and fling away the dross right and left, complaining that it soils their fingers. But such recklessness, lofty as it is, means debt, and debt means wretchedness. No student can afford to be in debt; the consequent anxiety starts up, spectre-like, between him and his books; he cannot exorcise it. Goldsmith, writing to his brother, says with simple pathos : "Teach to your son thrift and economy. Let his poor wandering uncle's example be placed before his eyes. I had learned from books to be disinterested and generous before I was taught from experience the necessity of being prudent. I had contracted the habits and notions of a philosopher while I was exposing myself to the insidious approaches of cunning, and often by being, even with my narrow finances, charitable to excess. I forgot the rules of justice, and placed myself in the very situation of the wretch who did not thank me for my bounty.' It may seem a sordid condition of happiness, but it is an inflexible one, that a young man should live within his income; he will not live up to it without, sooner or later, living beyond it. And then comes the first debt, to be followed quickly by another, and then another, with a long and dreary train behind; for debt is like a snowball, which enlarges as it moves along, vires acquirit eundo. The worst of it is, that the victim, from familiarity with it, too often loses all sense of danger, forgets the poisonous nature of the draught he drinks until it is destroying him. Or if he be of a sensitive temperament, haply he attains to no such condition of easy-mindedness, but writhes in agony beneath the pressure of a burden that is incessantly growing heavier. I am not at all sure that poverty is any great injury to a student, at least in these days, when the appliances of education are so cheap, and the road to knowledge has been cleared of most of the tolls. In the first place, it is a great stimulus to labour; so great a stimulus that Pythagoras said :-"Ability and necessity dwell near each other." Almost all our great thinkers and workers have been poor men-(I use the word "poor," of course, as an antithesis to "rich," and not in the sense of "indigent")-Locke and Newton, Milton and Shakespeare, Spenser and Wordsworth. Dr. Johnson owed much of his force of character to his poverty, which, indeed, in his case, approximated closely to want. He used to tell how Richard Savage and himself often walked the streets until four in the morning, conversing upon things human and divine, until they could endure the pangs of hunger no longer, and proceeded to breakfast on fourpence-halfpenny between them. Second, poverty aids the discipline of the heart. It teaches endurance and sympathy; we learn to feel for others through what we ourselves suffer. And third, it takes from us the means of yielding to the coarser temptations, and urges us to seek our pleasures in the study of Nature and the companionship of books. On the other hand, poverty has a hardening and narrowing effect |