Men in the Making

by Ambrose Shepherd

Permit me now to apply very briefly what has been so far advanced, first, to your pleasures; and, secondly, to something more important to you than old age, and that is—middle life.

To everything, says the Preacher, there is a time and a season, and it must be that youth is the time for amusements and pleasures, which are not so much the privileges of youth as native to it. We are told that Darwin in his old age expressed regret that he had deprived himself of so many of the pleasures and resources of life by his concentration upon that study, the results of which have made his name so justly famous. He gave to get; but he lived to doubt his own right to pay the price. And no young man should give place, no not for a moment, to a doctrine of work which excludes his right to the joys and abandon of his years. There is danger, and very real danger, lest we should take for granted what the "Grad-grinds" tell us, that the only thing which matters is that we do work, and are not idle. Work for its own sake is not enough. It may turn men into machines—all clatter and monotony; or it may make them fussy nuisances. "A soulless activity," says Canon Ainger, "may save a man from vagrancy only by turning him into a thing; or it may keep him from idleness by making him an egotist." There is the man who, to use the common phrase, "sticks at it" with scarcely a competing thought or interest. He scorns ease, and lives laborious days. For what? I once heard it said, and I believe it was true, of a prosperous Yorkshireman, that the real pleasure he had in his money, for which he had toiled hard, was in a kind of mental calculation as to how many of his neighbours he could buy up.

"I do all things that I may honour the Father," said Jesus: and work which is not under this impulse, has in it no element of permanent satisfaction. In some way every work has to be brought into a conscious relation to God, or we only swell the crowd either of self-seekers, or of the men whose toil leaves no such impression upon their character as gives sign or evidence of a sane or worthy aim and end.

To give to work its essential dignity, and preserve it from mechanical routine we must bring motive into it—high and worthy purpose. There is no virtue necessarily in being always at work, but there is tremendous power in being able to work when we do work. Do not discount the old advice because it is commonplace: "work when you work, and play when you play." Master the distinction there is between having what is called your "fling," and having your really "good time." Get all the rational pleasure you can out of your young days. Let your religion be no dog Cerberus, snarling at the heels of innocent enjoyment. But never lose sight of the fact that unless you have a definite and worthy purpose, to attain which you keep your good time subordinate, that good time will have the same relation to genuine pleasure that the throbbings of an ulcer have to the healthy action of the heart. And a very plain word is needed here. Our trouble to-day is not that young people will have their pleasures and amusements; it is that so many of them will have nothing else. One who knows his day has told us, that were it not for the sporting intelligence in the evening paper, not a few of our young men would forget how to read. It is a common experience to meet young men who have been decently educated, as things go, and yet they are ignorant as babies about the social and political questions which so vitally affect the welfare of the State. Decently educated, I say, as things go. But how far is that? "I have five clerks in my office," said a Bradford merchant lately, "who probably could tell me all I want to know and more, about a horse race, a cricket, or a football match; and not one of them could translate for me a foreign business letter. This is one principal reason," he added, "why Bradford is overrun with Germans, and why the Germans are getting hold of so much of our trade." On what is called the practical side of life, the first duty of a young man is to be efficient in whatever honest thing he is doing to earn his bread; and at the same time be preparing himself for whatever surprise or opportunity the future may have in store for him. A few hours in the week given seriously to the latter, will leave an ample margin of time for recreation and amusement; and who knows what he may need, until the need is there to test what he knows? To be great on sport, and a "stick" at one's business; to be an authority on amusements, and an ignoramus about almost everything else that is anything, is the surrender of manhood, and that in a day which has no need comparable with its need of capable men.

And such surrender has consequences that lie nearer than those which make themselves manifest in old age. Your next step is into middle life; and it is here where the question is finally decided whether it is, or is not, well for us that we are here at all. If a man has put little more than the rubbish of a selfish existence into his years he will, by the time he is old in them, be the victim of a callous insensibility which will carry him over into the stage beyond our human ken. An unworthy old age rarely feels much moral suffering; that but waits its awakening in the fires which shall try every man's work of what sort it is.

But when a man begins to sight the middle years, he learns to know himself as never before or after. This is the stage where increase of knowledge often means increase of sorrow. It is, in truth, the sorrow of finding out our limitations which, on their first acquaintance, often seem more appalling than they actually are. While youth may be saved by hope, by what is to be, middle life is often lost in the drab reality of what is. Every youth, who is not as indifferent to his possibilities as though he were nothing more than a lump of flesh, is about to become a numeral in the world. The tragedy enters when he knows himself to be what in a sense he must remain—a cipher, merely giving value to the men who do represent the numerals. When the youth, who used to talk about having the "ball at his feet," seems to have become very much the ball itself, to be kicked hither and thither as circumstances may determine, what then? Will he show that kicked he may be, but ball he is not? That circumstances may use him, but they shall not make him? The answer to this question will very much depend upon the stuff he put into his years, while as yet he knew not his limitations.

And even where middle life has won success in the things men covet, and for which they strive, it may be the success that is just deadly in its reaction of monotony. How often do we hear it said of a prosperous man, who in middle years is giving place to unworthy habits, or to ill-humour and chronic depression: "Would he had something to take him out of himself; some interest in anything, if it were but a harmless hobby." Think of a man being reduced to the need of a "hobby" to keep him out of moral mischief! What such a man, if man he can be called, really needs is some higher interest or a coffin. A hobby is well enough in its place, and much can be said for it, but when it becomes a man's only peradventure between himself and the devil, the world can probably spare him to its own advantage. The young have no little safety in their years, in the temporary buoyancy of the blood. It is when the former draw in, and the latter thins out, that dangerous things get their more obvious and, too often, fatal chance with men. It is when the first fires of passion have slowed down, and the ties of early friendship have relaxed, and the outlook appears to leave us with the problem, not how to live, but how to exist. I tremble at times when my experience suggests the dangers of those long stretches of emptiness, that so easily fill with the sinister and the unspeakable. I would pray, as a man in mortal terror, against the bottomless pit of a motiveless existence.

This is why I put emphasis upon the threshold of manhood; not that I believe it to be the most dangerous part of human life, but because I believe it is the time to safeguard the part that is. It is the time when habits can be cultivated, and resources acquired, which can make middle life as crowded with interest and good to enjoy as any of the earlier years, and infinitely more useful. But this is possible only when the middle years can command their own. Just as many of us "postpone life until after our funeral," so may we find ourselves in middle life discouraged and sullen because we cannot do what we would, only because we have not done what we ought. Men do not always go under because they cannot do things. They fail, not because they do not know what it is well to do, but because they do not choose to attempt it. And why do they not choose? So far as this question affects middle life, it is largely because so few of us have the grit to face its difficulties, and attack them, when we have to do it with the serious handicap of self-made disadvantages. It is while you are young that you must lay up these stores of living material for the after years; and this is the significance of it all—you can only do it, or you can do it most effectually, when you are young. As touching certain advantages, "the day after to-morrow is the only day that never comes."

Have your good time, I say, and in it fear God, and fear nothing else. Keep a clean youth, and enjoy it to the full. But let the thought have its place as a goad when required, or as a steadying influence when the spirits would gallop too fast—the thought in the question: How will it be with me when my years are thirty-five or forty? That trying, and in so many cases, that fatal forty! When the youth of "rose-light and romance has faded into the light of common day, and the horizon of life has shrunk incalculably, and when the flagging spirit no longer answers to the spur of external things, but must find its motive and energy from within, or find them not at all." See to it while you may, that these forces, when needed, are there, or whatever else you may gain will be but a mocking remembrancer of the greater thing you have lost.

I have but another word to add. If there are, as I trust there are, middle-aged, or even old men, who would leave this Ur of the Chaldees, with all its unworthy past, and make for a better country, do not, I plead with you, be discouraged by anything I have said. Remember, I have been talking to the young; but God forbid that what I have said to them should seem to exclude hope for you. Make your start, though you should get no further than Haran. In a matter so supreme, it is better to have tried and failed, than never to have tried at all. But you need not fail in any degree that success is possible to you; and a success is possible to you in which are issues of everlasting life. Whatever the past, build up with courage and humility what you can do. God willing, and by His grace, you have time yet to prove how a consecrated determination can stretch out life's limits, and wondrously redeem no little of past failure.