If you must vilify, condemn and eternally disparage, why, resign your position, and then when you are outside, damn to your heart's content. But I pray you, as long as you are a part of an institution, do not condemn it. Not that you will injure the institution—not that—but when you disparage a concern of which you are a part, you disparage yourself.
More than that, you are loosening the tendrils that hold you to the institution, and the first high wind that happens along, you will be uprooted and blown away in the blizzard's track—and probably you will never know why. The letter only says, "Times are dull and we regret there is not enough work," et cetera.
Everywhere you will find these out-of-a-job fellows. Talk with them and you will find that they are full of railing, bitterness, scorn and condemnation. That was the trouble—thru a spirit of fault-finding they got themselves swung around so they blocked the channel, and had to be dynamited. They were out of harmony with the place, and no longer being a help they had to be removed. Every employer is constantly looking for people who can help him; naturally he is on the lookout among his employees for those who do not help, and everything and everybody that is a hindrance has to go. This is the law of trade—do not find fault with it; it is founded on nature. The reward is only for the man who helps, and in order to help you must have sympathy.
You cannot help the Old Man so long as you are explaining in an undertone and whisper, by gesture and suggestion, by thought and mental attitude that he is a curmudgeon and that his system is dead wrong. You are not necessarily menacing him by stirring up this cauldron of discontent and warming envy into strife, but you are doing this: you are getting yourself on a well-greased chute that will give you a quick ride down and out. When you say to other employees that the Old Man is a curmudgeon, you reveal the fact that you are one; and when you tell them that the policy of the institution is "rotten," you certainly show that yours is.
This bad habit of fault-finding, criticising and complaining is a tool that grows keener by constant use, and there is grave danger that he who at first is only a moderate kicker may develop into a chronic knocker, and the knife he has sharpened will sever his head.
Hooker got his promotion even in spite of his many failings; but the chances are that your employer does not have the love that Lincoln had—the love that suffereth long and is kind. But even Lincoln could not protect Hooker forever. Hooker failed to do the work, and Lincoln had to try some one else. So there came a time when Hooker was superseded by a Silent Man, who criticised no one, railed at nobody—not even the enemy.
And this Silent Man, who could rule his own spirit, took the cities. He minded his own business, and did the work that no man can ever do unless he constantly gives absolute loyalty, perfect confidence, unswerving fidelity and untiring devotion. Let us mind our own business, and allow others to mind theirs, thus working for self by working for the good of all.
The Week-Day, Keep it Holy
Did it ever strike you that it is a most absurd and semi-barbaric thing to set one day apart as "holy?"
If you are a writer and a beautiful thought comes to you, you never hesitate because it is Sunday, but you write it down.