The Cap and Gown

by Charles Reynolds Brown

There is no shuffling nor chance in the moral world. Impulses lead to choices; choices readily become habits; habits harden speedily into character, and character determines destiny. Two and two make four all the way up, all the way down, and all the way in.

In a New York hotel the chambermaid one morning discovered the dead body of a young man and at his side, scrawled on a piece of paper, she found this last will and testament: “I leave to society a bad example. I leave to my father and mother all the sorrow they can bear in their old age. I leave to my brothers and sisters the memory of a misspent life. I leave to my wife a broken heart and to my children the name of a drunkard and a suicide. I leave to God a lost soul which has defied and insulted his loving mercy.”

He wrote it all out, signed it, and then shot himself. His appetites had gotten away with him, his habits were no longer under his control. He began as many an enthusiastic, generous young fellow begins by simply having a succession of “good times” and they grew on him until the habits he had developed were no longer his—he was theirs. He forgot that two and two make four, and the gruesome legacy he was compelled to leave issued as inevitably from his course of life as the sum total at the foot of a column of figures.

The sound health which serves as the physical basis of enlarging and enduring efficiency; the trained intelligence which knows what to do next and finds itself competent for the task; the type of character which is reliable and profitable for the life that now is and for that which is to come, all come to us as splendid reactions from that stable, definite, methodical order, seen and unseen, which enfolds us ever. What you receive as the natural rebound from your mode of life will be like in quality and proportionate in amount to that which you express in effort, for the law of returns, like the law of gravitation, is always on duty.

VIII
THE HIGHEST FORM OF REWARD

The Scriptures show their good sense by frankly facing and accepting the hope of reward as a legitimate source of motive. There are fine people who almost go into spasms over the idea of working for a reward. “Do right,” they say, “because it is right, not because you will gain something by it.” “Live nobly, because it is the highest duty there is, with no thought of what may come to you in consequence.” “Do your work well for the sheer joy of it, not because you will be paid well for good work.” All this is very pretty and does credit to the lovely dispositions of those who utter these sentiments, but it is just a little too good for this common earth.

It was just a little too good for the men who wrote the Bible. Jesus himself did not hesitate to say, “Do this, and great shall be your reward in heaven.” He said, “If any man shall give a cup of cold water in my name,” that is to say, in the right spirit, “he shall in no wise lose his reward.” He built squarely upon the foundation laid by that singer of old, “The statutes of the Lord are right; the commandments of the Lord are pure; the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether, and in keeping of them there is great reward.” The hope of reward according to the Scriptures is a legitimate source of motive.

But what form should the reward take? What is the highest form of reward? One finds all manner of answers to this question strung along in an ascending series. We find those who always think of reward in terms of material success. “It pays to be good,” these men say—to be good, at any rate, up to a certain point. “Honesty is the best policy”—in the long run as a method of business procedure it can show more dividends than dishonesty can. “The way of the transgressor is hard,” now in one way, now in another, but always hard at the end. Transgression does not pay when the returns are all in. The main theme of the book of Deuteronomy is that obedience to Jehovah will bring blessings wrought out in terms of material prosperity. “If thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, blessed shalt thou be in basket and in store; blessed shalt thou be in the city and in the field; blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out and when thou comest in.” Reckoned up in terms of visible success, righteousness would be the best asset a nation could possess.

We have here a great truth; it is not the whole truth, but it is a fragment of truth not to be despised. The young man in New York, whose main interest is material success, setting out to achieve his ambition by dishonesty is trying to make the Hudson River turn round and flow back to Albany. It cannot be done. He will get wet and muddy and be drowned, perhaps, for his pains and, when he is all through with his experiment, the Hudson will be flowing right along just the same.

In like manner, the big, strong, moral order which enfolds us whether we like it or not, whether we think about it or believe in it or not, the big, strong, moral order cannot be defied nor ignored. Here and there some young fellow thinks he has found a way of turning it round in what he supposes to be his own interest. He, too, simply gets wet and muddy, and drowned, perhaps, in his foolish efforts while the great, eternal verities of right and wrong are still there as they were before he pitted his puny strength against them. The fact stands that righteousness exalts a nation or an individual as nothing else can.