A learned clergyman was thus accosted by an illiterate preacher who despised education: "Sir, you have been to college, I presume?" "Yes, sir," was the reply. "I am thankful," said the former, "that the Lord opened my mouth without any learning." "A similar event," retorted the clergyman, "happened in Balaam's time."
"If a cloth were drawn around the eyes of Praxiteles' statue of Love," says Bulwer, "the face looked grave and sad; but as the bandage was removed, a beautiful smile would overspread the countenance. Even so does the removal of the veil of ignorance from the eyes of the mind bring radiant happiness to the heart of man."
A young man just graduated told the President of Trinity College that he had completed his education, and had come to say good-by. "Indeed," said the President, "I have just begun my education."
Many an extraordinary man has been made out of a very ordinary boy; but in order to accomplish this we must begin with him while he is young. It is simply astonishing what training will do for a rough, uncouth, and even dull lad, if he has good material in him, and comes under the tutelage of a skilled educator before his habits have become confirmed. Even a few weeks' or months' drill of the rawest and roughest recruits in the late Civil War so straightened and dignified stooping and uncouth soldiers, and made them so manly, erect, and courteous in their bearing, that their own friends scarcely knew them. If this change is so marked in the youth who has grown to maturity, what a miracle is possible in the lad who is taken early and put under a course of drill and systematic training, both physical, mental, and moral. How many a man who is now in the penitentiary, in the poorhouse, or among the tramps, or living out a miserable existence in the slums of our cities, bent over, uncouth, rough, slovenly, has possibilities slumbering within the rags, which would have developed him into a magnificent man, an ornament to the human race instead of a foul blot and scar, had he only been fortunate enough early in life to have come under efficient and systematic training.
Laziness begins in cobwebs and ends in iron chains. The more business a man has, the more he can do, for be learns to economize his time.
The industry that acquired riches, according to a wise teacher, the patience that is required in obtaining them, the reserved self-control, the measuring of values, the sympathy felt for fellow-toilers, the knowledge of what a dollar costs to the average man, the memory of it—all these things are preservative. But woe to the young farmer who hates farming; does not like sowing and reaping; is impatient with the dilatory and slow path to a small though secure fortune in the neighborhood where he was born, and comes to the city, hoping to become suddenly rich, thinking that he can break into the palace of wealth and rob it of its golden treasures!
Edison described his repeated efforts to make the phonograph reproduce an aspirated sound, and added: "From eighteen to twenty hours a day for the last seven months I have worked on this single word 'specia.' I said into the phonograph 'specia, specia, specia,' but the instrument responded 'pecia, pecia, pecia.' It was enough to drive one mad. But I held firm, and I have succeeded."
The road to distinction must be paved with years of self-denial and hard work.
Horace Mann, the great author of the common school system of Massachusetts, was a remarkable example of that pluck and patience which can work and wait. His only inheritance was poverty and hard work. But he had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and a determination to get on in the world. He braided straw to get money to buy books which his soul thirsted for.
To Jonas Chickering there were no trifles in the manufacture of a piano. Others might work for salaries, but he was working for fame and fortune. Neither time nor pains were of any account to him compared with accuracy and knowledge. He could afford to work and wait, for quality, not quantity, was his aim. Fifty years ago the piano was a miserable, instrument compared with the perfect mechanism of to-day. Chickering was determined to make a piano which would yield the fullest, richest volume of melody with the least exertion to the player, and one which would withstand atmospheric changes and preserve its purity and truthfulness of tone. And he strove patiently and persistently till he succeeded.