The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character

by Robert E. Speer

And, of course, this is the easier way of self-education too. For a man to love himself so much that he never thinks of his neighbours, to blind his eyes so completely to consequences that he can live for the passing moment,—this is a very easy philosophy, and the man or the woman who is able to practice it will seem, for a while, to live in the sunshine, a fine butterfly, smooth-going life. All this is easier than to say, not, What is my impulse? but, What ought I? not, What do I like? but, What is best for all the world? not, What is the easy way? but, What is the hard way over which the feet go that carry the burdens of mankind, that bear the load of the world?

But, though it is the easy way for a while, there comes a time when it is no longer the easy way. When in his little room above the gate the old king bowed his gray head in his hands and with breaking heart sobbed out: “O my son Absalom! my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”—it was no longer the easy way. When Adonijah rose up in insurrection against his old father as he lay on his dying bed, gathering his little company of sycophants around him and setting himself up in his father’s place, then it was no longer the easy way that the old man had pursued.

And to-day still, fathers and mothers who for a little while thought the easy way was never to ask their children why they had done so, but to let them go their own way with no imposition of outward authority or control, find after a while that the easy way has turned bitterly hard. I have a friend, a leading merchant in one of our large cities. Some time ago another friend was visiting him, and as they walked down the street together, suddenly a large car whizzed around the corner, full of young people, among them the merchant’s son. This was the middle of the forenoon and the boy was supposed to be at work in his father’s establishment. The father turned to his friend and said: “I wish I knew how I could hold my boy in.” But my friend understood why he could not. He knew that only two or three years before the son had been rewarded for passing examinations at college, examinations that it ought to have been taken for granted that he would pass. But his father thought he should be rewarded for passing them, and he bought a car and sent it up to him at college. Now he wonders why this son does not know how to bind himself to arduous duty.

And in our own lives the easy education does not go easily all the way. There comes a time when, having always indulged ourselves, we can’t break the habit; when, never having taken our lives in our hands and reined them to the great ministries of mankind, we discover that we cannot. We find that we obey our caprices; follow any impulse; cannot stick to any task; do not know a principle when we see it; have no iron or steel anywhere in our character; are the riffraff of the world that the worthy men and women have to bear along as they go. In Mr. Kipling’s inelegant lines:

“We was rotten ’fore we started—we was never disciplined;

We made it out a favour if an order was obeyed;

Yes, every little drummer ’ad ’is rights and wrongs to mind,

So we had to pay for teachin’—an’ we paid!”

Now I suggest that we put all this positively to ourselves, for every one of us knows that we are treading near some of the moral realities of weakness and need in our day and nation. Why should restraint, obedience, the authority of duty and God be let into our lives? In order that out of all these things self-control may come. And why should there be this submission and control of our lives by duty, and truth and God? Well, the reasons are obvious, the moment we begin to think about them.