And at bottom this is the source of all power and service. Not what a man knows, or what he can say; but what is he? what can he can do? Not what he can do for his board and lodging, as the slave who is "hired for life"; but what can he do out of the fullness of his resources, the fullness of his helpfulness, the fullness of himself? The work the world will not let die was never paid for—not in fame, not in money, not in power.
The decadence of literature, of which much is said to-day, is not due to the decadence of man. It is not the effect of the nerve strain of over-wrought generations born too late in the dusk of the ages. Its nature is this—that uncritical and untrained men have come into a heritage they have not earned. They will pay money to have their feeble fancy tickled. The decadence of literature is the struggle of mountebanks to catch the public eye. There is money in the literature of decay, and those who work for money have "verily their reward." But these performances are not the work of men. They have no relation to literature, or art, or human life. These are not in decadence because imitations are sold on street-corners or tossed into our laps on railway trains. As well say that gold is in its decadence because brass can be burnished to look like it; or that the sun is in his dotage because we have filled our gardens with Chinese lanterns.
"No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
My oldest force is good as new
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
Gives back the bending heavens in dew."
Literature has never been paid for. It has never asked the gold nor the plaudits of the multitude. Job, and Hamlet, and Faust, and Lear, were never written to fill the pages of a Sunday newspaper. John Milton and John Bunyan were not publishers' hacks; nor were John Hampden, John Bright, or Samuel Adams under pay as walking-delegates of reform.
No man was hired to find out that the world was round, or that the valleys are worn down by water, or that the stars are suns. No man was paid to burn at the stake or die on the cross that other men might be free to live. The sane, strong, brave, heroic souls of all ages were the men who, in the natural order of things, have lived above all considerations of pay or glory. They have served not as slaves hoping for reward, but as gods who would take no reward. Men could not reward Shakespeare, or Darwin, or Newton, or Helmholtz for their services any more than we could pay the Lord for the use of His sunshine. From the same inexhaustible divine reservoir it all comes—the service of the great man and the sunshine of God.
"Twice have I molded an image,
And thrice outstretched my hand;
Made one of day and one of night,
And one of the salt sea strand
One in a Judean manger,
And one by Avon's stream;
One over against the mouths of Nile,
And one in the Academe."
And in such image are men made every day, not only in Bethlehem or in Stratford, not alone on the banks of the Nile or the Arno; but on the Columbia, or the Sacramento, or the San Francisquito, it may be, as well. All over the earth, in this image, are the sane, and the sound, and the true. And when and where their lives are spent arises generations of others like them, men in the true order. Not alone men in the "image of God," but "gods in the likeness of men."
It is to the training of the genuine man that the universities of the world are devoted. They call for the higher sacrifice, the sacrifice of those who have powers not needed in the common struggle of life, and who have, therefore, something over and beyond this struggle to give to their fellows. Large or small, whatever the gift may be, the world needs it all, and to every good gift the world will respond a thousand-fold. Strength begets strength, and wisdom leads to wisdom. "There is always room for the man of force, and he makes room for many." It is the strong, wise, and good of the past who have made our lives possible. It is the great human men, the "men in the natural order," that have made it possible for "the plain, common men," that make up civilization, to live, rather than merely to vegetate.
We hear those among us sometimes who complain of the shortness of life, the smallness of truth, the limited stage on which man is forced to act. But the men who thus complain are not men who have filled this little stage with their action. The man who has learned to serve the Lord never complains that his Master does not give him enough to do. The man who helps his fellow-men does not stand about with idle hands to find men worthy of his assistance. He who leads a worthy life never vexes himself with the question as to whether life is worth living.
We know that all our powers are products of the needs and duties of our ancestors. Wisdom too great to be translated into action is an absurdity. For wisdom is only knowing what it is best to do next. Virtue is only doing it. Virtue and happiness have never been far apart from each other. To know and to do is the essence of the highest service. Those the world has a right to honor are those who found enough in the world to do. The fields are always white to their harvest.