The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character

by Robert E. Speer

That was all he did. And yet, at that very moment, Goldwin Smith had in his possession letters of Disraeli, with which he could have crushed him. Openly in Parliament Disraeli had said that he had never asked Peel for any position. But among Peel’s papers which had been placed in his hands Smith had a letter in which Disraeli had abjectly begged Peel to give him office. All that Smith needed to do was to publish Disraeli’s own letter to Peel and it would have ruined Disraeli’s career. But to Goldwin Smith that was not a noble thing to do. Peel’s correspondence had not been given to him to use in self-defense, or for any personal justification of his own, and he repressed that letter until Disraeli was dead. Then, years after, all of Peel’s correspondence was published and the whole world knew what a gentleman Goldwin Smith had been. Our modern ideals of what constitutes high social and national standing and character say: “Fight fire with fire. Dishonour releases honour from itself. He struck you foul; strike him so in return.” But the man who had learned self-restraint in the school of God’s loyalty and truth, who understood that power is ours, not to use for self-seeking, but for the good of men and for God’s honour, would not stoop to any such disloyalty and shame.

Once more. Whose judgment is of any value? Who would have thought of going to Adonijah and asking his opinion on anything whatsoever? He did not know right from wrong. He never thought over the issues of right or wrong. What would I like to do? What does passion bid me do? What is my whim or caprice for to-night?—that was as far as Adonijah had ever thought. No man would ever go to him, as no men will ever come to you and me if we have not been trained in the school of moral discrimination, if we have not looked on ethical principle and duty in deciding the question whether each thing is really right for us and for the whole world. If we are to be men and women to whom people will come for comfort and strength and guidance, to whom our own children can come with assurance that they will get the truth, we must be men and women who now place ourselves beneath the firm discipline of God.

We see all this put simply in two great things. We see it in our Lord’s constant appeal, while here in the world, for men and women of fiber and discipline. One came to Him and said: “Lord, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus, looking upon him, loved him and said: “I would not think of counselling anything hard. You must not sacrifice anything. It is all very easy. The Father above is a Father of great tenderness and compassion. He would not lay a straw’s weight upon any child of His. Go; live according to your desires and by the natural impulses of your heart, and for that you shall have treasure in heaven.” Oh, no; He did not say that. He said: “Go, sell all that thou hast, and come and follow me. Except ye love less than duty your father and mother and brother and sister, yea, and your own life also, ye cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

We see it, too, in God’s way with men as He laid down His great laws at the beginning, when His people were but as a race of little children. Why did He not say to them: “This ye may do. The world is sweet and fair. This ye may do, and all shall be easy to you”? Why, on the other hand, did He speak to them in the stern admonitions of the Decalogue: “Thou shalt. Thou shalt not”? God never hesitates to lay His great denials upon mankind and at last to stifle us beneath the restraint of death that He may issue us forth through that restraint into the infinite liberties of the life immortal.

Now do not brush all this away to-day, or any day, light-heartedly, as it can be so easily brushed away. “Oh, don’t shadow our lives,” you will say, “with your denials and your prohibitions and your restraints. Leave life free and sweet as the summer air and the flowers of the field”—that last how long? No, my friends, it were well for us that we should learn this lesson, and learn it now, ere the time comes when the silver cord is loosed and the wheel is broken at the cistern and the grinders cease and the long shadows fall. You remember a tragic incident in New York a few years ago—I do not need to recall the details of it—when two young lives made shipwreck of themselves just because they thought that impulse and caprice were the free voices that they might obey. When it was all over, and the two lives had drawn the veil of night across their short-lived evil joy, one of the papers published a letter which the girl had written to a friend:

“My friend,” she wrote, “you and I and Fred, young, heedless, cynical, living in this reckless town of New York, may laugh sometimes at the old things like law and religion, when they say, ‘Thou shalt not.’ We may think that phrase was written for old fogies, and we may sneer at ‘the wages of sin is death’; but, my friend, there comes to us some time knowledge that the law and religion are right. What they say we shall not do, we cannot do without suffering. Fred and I have learned that. The wages of sin is death.”

It is worse than death; for what was Hell in that great vision that John saw? Why, nothing but the removal of all restraint. “He which is filthy, let him be filthy still.” He is unclean, let him be unclean. He is unholy, let him be unholy. Take all the restraints away. That is Hell.

Away from the dark gates that open thither may another voice call us here to-day, the clear, strong, summoning voice of Him Who said of Himself: “I came not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. I do always those things that please my Father,” and Who in the garden of Gethsemane, when the anguish was almost greater than He could bear, yet found rest when He prayed, “Father, not my will, but thine be done”; that out of the willfulness and capriciousness and the whim and mood of our little self-indulgent lives we may pass into the great, strong, steadfast, sovereign will that waits for us; that we may stand fast and be strong in the strength and chastening of God!

Now I have put it—this matter of our need of discipline—in the most personal and individual way, but it is our great national and corporate need. The body of a nation can only exist through the ordered discipline of its members and the spirit of a nation like the spirit of a man needs to be cleansed of all the lusts of willfulness and self-indulgence. The spirit of our American nation needs such cleansing. Mr. Kipling has drawn us his picture of it: