The Call of the Twentieth Century, an Address to Young Men

by David Starr Jordan

In general, the sinner is not the man who sets out in life to be wicked. Few men are born wicked; many are born weak. False ideas of manliness; false conceptions of good fellowship, which false ideas of the relationship of men and women give, wreck many a young man of otherwise good intentions. The sinner is the man who cannot say no. The fall through vice to sin is a matter of slow transition. One virtue after another is yielded up as the strain on the will becomes too great. In Kipling's fable of Parenness, the demon appears before the clerk in the Indian service, who has been too long a good fellow among the boys. It asks him to surrender three things in succession: his trust in man, his faith in woman, then the hopes and ambitions of his childhood. When these are given up, as they must be in the life of dissipation, the demon leaves him in exchange a little crust of dry bread. Bare existence without joy or hope is all that the demon can give when the forces of life are burned out.

In our colleges, the one ethical principle kept before the athlete by his associates is this: Never break training rules. The pitcher who smokes a cigarette throws away his game. The punter who spends the night at a dance loses his one chance of making a goal. The sprinter who takes the glass of convivial beer breaks no record. His record breaks him. Some day we shall realize that the game of life is more than the game of foot-ball. We have work every day more intricate than pitching curves, more strenuous than punting the ball. We must keep in trim for it. We must hold ourselves in repair. We must remember training rules. When this is done, we shall win not only games and races, but the great prizes of life. Almost half the strength of the men of America is now wasted in dissipation, gross or petty, in drink or smoke. This strength would be saved could we remember training rules. Through the training rules of our fathers we have come to consider as part of our inheritance the Puritan Conscience. As the success of our nation is built upon this conscience, so in like fashion depends upon it the success of our daily life.

I had a friend once, a mining man of some education, who made his fortune in bonanza days in Nevada, and who drank up what he had made with the boys who have long since passed away. As a hopeless sot he visited the gold cure at Los Gatos. Not finding much relief, he walked over to Palo Alto to borrow of me his fare to San Francisco. He said that he was going to pawn his goods for a fare to Nevada, where he meant to kill himself. Whether he did so or not, I do not know; for ten years have gone by and I have never heard of him again.

As he sat in my room, haggard, bloodshot, ragged, gin-flavored, a little boy who had then never known sin, came in, and being no respecter of persons, took him for a man and offered him his hand.

Being taken for a man, brought him back his manhood for a moment. The visions of evil left him, and from Dickens' poem of "The Children" he repeated almost to himself these words:—

"'I know now how Jesus could liken The Kingdom of God to a child.'"

The old scene came back to him. When the Master was teaching, the children crowded about him, and there were those who would send them away. But the Master said, "No, let the little children come unto me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." And again he said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." And again those whose services the Lord of the centuries could use, he likened to little children.

And of the many ways in which this likeness can be used this is one. The child is born with brain and nervous system adequate to its many purposes in life, if it is suffered to grow naturally, to become what God meant it to be. There are not many children of sin not made so by vice, intemperance, lust, and obscenity. They are victims of their elders' folly, of our carelessness as to their environment. Half the troubles of men of our race come through self-inflicted injury to the nervous system. We are tormented by the "fool-killer." If we could revert to the child's simple purity, the free movement of its machinery of life, we should find ourselves in a new heaven on a new earth. We could understand for ourselves part of what the Master meant. We should know now how Jesus could liken the Kingdom of God to a child.

All forms of subjective enjoyment, all pleasures that begin and end with self, unrelated to external things, are insane and unwholesome, destructive alike to rational enjoyment and to effectiveness in life. And this is true of spurious emotions alike, whether the pious ecstasies of a half-starved monk, the neurotic imaginings of a sentimental woman, or the riots of a debauchee. He is the wise man who for all his life can keep mind and soul and body clean.

"I know of no more encouraging fact," says Thoreau, "than the ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects beautiful. It is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. This morally we can do."