Life has never presented many “problems” to me. I have been too busy. Working people do not evolve “problems.” They are invented by the learned idlers, gossiping about the market place like Paul’s Athenians, “who spend their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing.”
I have lived a busy life. I entered the newspaper grind early, and I have never been out of the old mill. Whether I abode at home or went on long journeys, around the town or around the world, I carried my work with me. My vacations were merely “assignments.” The nearest postoffice was a copyhook. People and things were “stories.”
It is a good world. Five times in the story of Creation the historian pauses to say as new things were made, “and God saw that it was good.” And the seventh day—the day of completion and rest, He made holy forever, “blessing and sanctifying it.” So the cornerstone of creation is goodness, the finial holiness. How could a better world be made?
It isn’t enough to be good nor to do good. It is quite essential to do good in the right way. A prayer for many of our Best Sinners would be—“Dear Christ of the Leper, Savior of the Publican, Lover of the Unlovely and Friend of the Hateful, forgive me in that I have done good spitefully, that I have given alms scornfully, that I have done a kindness savagely, and that I have loved a friend grudgingly.”
Whenever I have done right, it has always seemed to me that somebody or something helped me. But when I have gone wrong, I have sinned through no one’s fault but my own. No man ever made me do wrong. The man who has the headache next morning is the fellow who transgressed the night before. The sinner can no more shift his responsibility than he can wish his headache off on the other fellow.