President Garfield, when at the head of Hiram College, once addressed his students, in a way that made a lasting impression, on the subject of “Margins.” Personal distinction, success, depend, not on the average bulk of knowledge, power, and skill, but on that margin that extends a little beyond the reach of one’s fellows, a margin gained by some extra devotion, by sacrifice and work, by ideals a little more advanced or more clearly seen.
Some recent and notable inductions of physiological psychology along the line of evolution reaffirm that without pain there can be no happiness, that without struggle there can be no positive character, that at times punishment may be most salutary and that a deadhead in society degenerates as does a parasite in the animal kingdom. Since these views are in line with the teachings of instinct and reason, from old Plato down, we may believe that evolution as applied to the spiritual nature of man is, indeed, becoming a hopeful doctrine. We have had somewhat too much of Herbert Spencer’s pleasure theory, and pursuit of inclination, and the discipline of natural consequences, and lines of least resistance. The moral drama must be enacted on a field of conflict.
The principle of personal evolution is “ideals and action.” Mr. Gladstone’s wonderful character and great career are a pointed illustration of this fact. Even his fixed standards of conduct were a contribution to his growth and greatness. He always asked concerning a policy of state: Is it just? No unworthy motive was ever known to determine his public or his private acts. While working ever according to permanent standards of right, his was essentially a life of change and growth. Mr. Gladstone had a mind always seeking truth, and, moreover, had a rare capacity for receiving new ideas. In his history one can discover many distinct stages of development. He himself acknowledges three great “transmigrations of spirit” in his parliamentary career. He broke away from his early political traditions and, in consequence, more than once was obliged to seek new constituents who “marched with the movement of his mind.” He was ever “struggling toward the light,” and was ever a fighter. His political opponents said of him that his foot was always in the stirrup. His mind rested not by inactivity, but by “stretching itself out in another direction.” He threw himself into new and important movements for humanity with tremendous zeal and force.
Lord Macaulay pithily expresses a law of human progress: “The point which yesterday was invisible is our goal to-day, and will be our starting post to-morrow.” Maurice Maeterlinck says: “If at the moment you think or say something that is too beautiful to be true in you—if you have but endeavored to think or to say it to-day, on the morrow it will be true. We must try to be more beautiful than ourselves; we shall never distance our soul.”
In the problem of growth do not neglect Emerson’s principle of compensation. As men injure or help others, so they injure or help themselves. Punishment is the inseparable attendant of crime. Requital is swift, sure, and exact. Vice makes spiritual blindness. The real drama of life is within. Some one has said that punishment for misdeeds is not something which happens to a man, but something which happens in a man. Balzac describes a magic skin, endowed with power to measure the term of life of its possessor, which shrank with his every expressed wish. Personal worth grows or shrinks with the daily life and thought. Every one can will his own growth in strength and symmetry or can become dwarfed and degenerate. Wrong takes away from the sum of worth; virtue makes increase from the source of all good. Emerson says that even a man’s defects may be turned to good. For instance, if he has a disposition that fails to invite companionship, he gains habits of self-help, and thus, “like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.”
If you would see the fulness of God’s revelation in men, look into the minds of those whose biographies are worth writing—men who in affairs of the world have shown clear thought and accurate judgment, and in spiritual things have had visions that may strengthen and confirm your feeble faith. Study the record of their words spoken at the fireside in the presence of intimate and congenial friends, when they showed glimpses of the real self. Learn in biography the history of great souls and see in them the ideal which is the ideal of the race, and, hence, your ideal. With the going out of this century some great lives have ended—lives that embodied high types of rugged, honest satire, political power, poetic thought, pure statesmanship, ethical standards, religious faith, scientific devotion. Their histories have been written, and enough is in them to stir the semiconscious indolent nature of any young man to cultivate a high personal ideal. When I left college my first investment was in a few additional good books. I advise students to buy a few of the best biographies recently published, and read them with a reverent mind.
When you see a man of marked power, you may be sure, always sure, that he has used means of growth which average people ignore, means without which his strength would never have appeared. He has been a student, perhaps of Plato, of Shakespeare, of the Bible, of science or of human nature. He has gone deeply into the character or writings of master minds in some field of knowledge or activity. If he has a truly great nature he is able to find in many a passage of Hebrew writings a power that welled up from the great hearts of the prophets of old—or a wisdom that gradually evolved with civilization through experiment, disaster, struggle, and contrition, and was corrected and formulated with rare understanding by the few great minds of history. Such writings are a very wellspring of knowledge and understanding for a young man of this or any age.
Have you read the earlier as well as the later writings of Rudyard Kipling? What a growth of power! The evolution of his ideal ever promises and realizes greater things. When recently it seemed that the riper fruits of his progress would be denied us, the keenest solicitude was everywhere manifest. It was a spontaneous tribute to the principle of ideal spiritual evolution in the individual. We now know Kipling’s secret. In his weakness and his sorrow he has already turned to a new and more ambitious undertaking and has gathered to himself all material that may enable him to pluck out from his subject the heart of its mystery, and reveal it to the world of thought and culture. It is with the magic of industry that he evolves the ideal of his life.
The following story is told of Kipling—that it is not authentic does not rob it of its use: Father and son were on a voyage. The father, suffering from seasickness, had retired to his cabin, when an officer appeared and cried: “Your son has climbed out on the foreyard, and if he lets go he’ll be drowned; we cannot save him.” “Oh, is that all?” replied Mr. Kipling; “he won’t let go.”