LECTURE I
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY
Whether there should be compulsory military training in America is a question which some people will answer yes or no according to their general theories and others according to their observation of the actual effects of such training on moral character. But whatever our views may be on this familiar question, whether we regard military service as ethically helpful in its influence or as morally injurious, we cannot differ as to the need in our national character of those qualities of self-control, of quick and unquestioning obedience to duty, of joyful contempt of hardship, and of zest in difficult and arduous undertakings which, rightly or wrongly, we consider soldierly, which we attribute in such rich measure to our forefathers, and which the moral exigencies of our national task to-day as peremptorily demand. To put these primary and elemental needs as sharply as possible, let us call them discipline and austerity. Our American character needs more of both.
I do not know a better starting point than is found in one of those vivid modern touches upon which we constantly come in the Old Testament. This one is in the account of the closing year of King David’s life. The story seems ancient and far away until we suddenly read: “His father had not displeased him at any time saying, Why hast thou done so?” If we were to translate the words more directly into the language of our own day, we should say, “His father had always let him do exactly as he pleased.” The reference is to David and his son Adonijah, and to the want of discipline by which the father had ruined his boy.
It is not hard to reconstruct the story. David was busy about his cares as king, and his heart was indulgent towards his children. Adonijah seems to have been his youngest son, and the father let him have his way, never reining him up or checking him by asking why he had done thus or so. David pursued, in other words, the modern theory of child training: that the one principle by which children should be educated is the principle of letting what is naturally in them come out; that they must not be crossed or frustrated, or have any external discipline or control laid upon their lives. This is, of course, the extreme of it, but in some form we hear the theory and see it applied all about us every day.
And it is a modern theory of self-education, also. We are told that life should be left free to follow its native impulses; that it should not be thwarted and intimidated by the conventions and prohibitions of society; that men and women should consult their own hearts and then should move out quite freely in obedience to their promptings; that their lives and the lives of their children should not be twisted or deflected by the imposition of any external authority or command.
Well, that was the way Adonijah was brought up. His father was rich. The boy had his own establishment, his own horses, his own retinue of attendants, and round about him, as about any oriental king’s son, there would be the usual crowd of flatterers and sycophants. There was no will or desire that he had not the means to gratify, and his father let him have his way.
Further, he was the younger brother of Absalom, and the ancient record says that they were handsome and popular boys. They had a way that carried along those who came in touch with them, and as the king’s sons, and the leading young men of the city, we have no difficulty in understanding the atmosphere in which they lived and the conditions within which they grew.
It must be confessed that this was the easy way of going about the matter. It is far easier to let a child have its own way than to endeavour by wisdom and patience and strength, to study and decide what is best for the child and without hurting the child’s will, to guide it into the better way. It was far less care to David to let Absalom and Adonijah go than it would have been to take these high-strung sons of his in hand and endeavour to break them to discipline and truth, and to send them out into life real men of power. It was much easier never to call them and to say, “Boys, why did you do this?” Much easier never to lay any authority or guidance upon them from without, much easier, especially for a man like David. He had grown up on a farm, with all the hardship and frugality of farm life, with no privileges as a lad, and now that he was the king of his nation, he was able to do anything whatever for his sons. It was difficult to refuse them the things he had never had. Easily and indulgently—for he was a man of kindly heart all his days—he found it simpler not to lay hard restraints upon his boys when he could give them their own way.