How to Face Life

by Stephen S. Wise

But while life is to be lived in the spirit of self-reverence and self-reliance, life’s great questions cannot be faced aright unless they be faced selflessly. Life is not to be egocentric but heterocentric. The question that a man must put is not what is he going to get out of life, how can he get the most out of life, but how can he put the most and the best into life. Life is not to be interpreted in terms of self, of individual gain, of personal advantage. If it be possible to differentiate between two classes in the world, these classes are respectively made up of the men who read life in the language of privilege and advantage and the men who interpret life in the terms of duty and obligation and responsibility. The selfless are the only beings who know how to live, who have learned and mastered the art of life. It is always possible to draw the distinction between the man who lives for himself, for what he can get out of life, for the enhancement of his own fame, for the enlargement of his own power, and the man who puts himself second, who lives for the good of others, who lives for the good, who is capable of denying self. The noblest of men and women are they who prescribe life to self in terms of duty to the world.

I venture to say to youth this day that there are two great needs in the life of youth, if life is to be truly and finely faced. Have an ideal, something to live by, and live for that ideal, wholly, steadfastly, unwaveringly. Many men are willing to cherish an ideal, to behold a vision, to catch a gleam, but they do not seem to understand that ideals are not to be had cheaply, that a vision is not to be gained for the asking. One comes upon men and women in every walk of life entirely ready to pursue an ideal, but the pursuit must impose no difficulty, must involve no sacrifice. These are the idealists who falter not until sacrifice be demanded of them, and then their ideal is suffered to pass as if the ideal were nothing more than a fair-weather friend rather than a refuge in time of trouble, a bulwark during hours of trial and amid the storms of temptation.

Nor are ideals reserved for the great and outstanding in life. Every one of us has a goal, and you are what your goal is. Your life will ultimately define itself in the terms of your ideal. Let your ideal be high and it will exalt you. Suffer your ideal to be low and it will be sure to debase you. You are your goal: your ideal is you. Life often breaks down here, in one of these two critical places, in the matter of willing highly and of having holily. Some men have neither vision of goal nor choice of way. Some men have the vision but stumble on the way,—the men who think the goal more important than the way, forgetting that the way is the goal. And so many falter and fumble, forgetting that life’s most important choice is as truly of a path as of the goal, that the way that leads thither is of the essence of the dream and the triumph. What thou wouldst have highly thou must have holily. We will to have high things, but we are not prepared to achieve them holily, as if the manner of the quest were less holy than the matter of the goal.

Who does not know of men in business who aim to secure a competence and are resolved to put by the ways that are sharp and mean, after a fortune has been secured? Men vainly imagine that after they have amassed much they will neutralize the evil they have done by doing much good, but in the meantime they have done evil to themselves and are no longer free to live by the ideal. Giving themselves unholily to the quest of the high, they have become transformed and debased into something mean and strange. One knows of men in the ministry to whom is given the putatively wise counsel to be discreetly cautious and evasively silent until the time comes for the occupancy of a great pulpit, when, as it is basely said, a man can afford to speak out of his soul. But when the great pulpit prize is won, the gleam, alas, is gone, the vision lies shattered. The man has been corrupted and his soul corroded and he who was willing for a time to be silent in the hope that some day, through the methods of silence, he might achieve the right of speaking out more bravely, has in the meantime become a dumb dog who has lost the power as well as the will to utter himself in fashion brave and unafraid.

Seemingly good men, outwardly decent men enter into political life and imagine that they must for a time strike hands with corruption until the hour will come when they shall be able to smite corruption with their own fists. They palter and they falter, whispering sorrowfully, “Truly it is regrettable, but one must do these things.” One distinguished statesman in American life declared to a friend many years ago that there are times when a man must eat a peck of dirt in order to gain high office. He gained the office, he ate his peck, and the tragedy is that it is not only become the steady article of his diet, but he loves it and he would not live without it, that it is become of the very essence of his being.

In other words, a man cannot wallow through the mire to the skies. No man can have two standards, one to be followed until he be forty or fifty, and then suddenly put away. No man can divest himself of the lower ideal which he has adopted as a temporary expedient, because in the meantime it has come to have the mastery over his soul. Putting aside the great choice, the hour comes when a man finds himself incapable of the great refusal and the standard to which he gave his temporary adherence, to be abandoned in the years of opulence and safety, becomes his despotic and inescapable master. It is no more possible to have two standards in the world of the spirit than it is possible to prescribe two different moral standards for men and women. Unity must be sought and achieved at the outset, not a lowered standard in the beginning and a higher standard in the end. The habit of the soul cannot be altered at will. Once to every man and not a thousand times comes the moment to decide, and the earlier decision will in part, if not in whole, be determinative of every later choice.

And if, young men and women, there were nothing else for which to prepare, there is the future, there is the holy calling of parenthood to be pursued by most of you. Have I not the right to appeal to young men and women to-day to remember how much or how little they can make of their own lives, and may we not base such appeal upon the truth that they are to be the makers and the molders of the morrow; that unless their lips and lives proclaim the voice of God in the soul of man, there will follow a little-souled and mean-hearted generation instead of a race of great-hearted and noble-souled men and women.

A beautiful passage in an allegory recently presented upon the stage tells of the song of unborn souls, which are dreaming of the parenthood to be their lot upon earth and looking forward with heavenly joy to the supreme felicity and benediction of parenthood. The most important duty of youth is to prepare with consciousness and consecration for life’s highest duty,—the duty of parenthood. Shall that future be polluted, shall that heritage be befouled? In reminding young men and women as I do that they are the trustees of the morrow, that they hold in their keeping the destiny of all the future, I am tempted to ask a question. What if I were to bring a little child before you, some beautiful child of a year or two, and what if some man sitting in this company were to come hither and for some unknown reason strike that child: would it not be with difficulty that we could restrain ourselves from doing violence to such a creature? What of the men and women committing a crime infinitely more hurtful, who would not strike a little child, but who, none the less, are ready to doom unborn generations to a heritage of evil, of hurt, of shame? What young man or woman will not think upon that?

A further word should be spoken to young women who in every generation are standard-bearers, and not only standard-bearers but standard-lifters. I know it to be true that ofttimes women conform to the lower standards which men impose upon them. Yet is it true that women may be the makers of standards if they will, and that, if they consent to the lowering of the standards, men will readily and, alas, eagerly lapse to the lower levels. Will not young women understand that, if they suffer standards to be lowered, if they for any reason yield to the temptation to be their poorer, unworthier selves in the sight of men, then will they corrupt men, then will they in very truth have broken faith with the moral order which has vested womanhood with the supreme privilege of exalting standards and by the exalting of standards exalting men.

I have said nothing up to this time about the place of God in the life of youth. I never feel it my duty to urge you to believe in God as if faith in God, as if trust in God, as if the acceptance of God were a task to be superimposed rather than a privilege to be coveted. To young men and women I would say that the one thing in the world they may not omit to do is to leave room for God in their lives. But you cannot leave room for God if your life be choked and clogged with things, and things, and things. Leave a place in your life for the spirit of God and God will find his way into your life and lead you to the making of a life divine.