Essay No. 28
"The Best Men are the Men
who aim at the Best"
BY
The Most Rev. J. B. Crozier, D.D.
(Archbishop of Armagh.)
IN one of the greatest novels of the last century the writer makes the hero of her story say, in answer to the hope that the man's master would realise how much more valuable the workman would be if he made him his partner : "Nay, sir, I don't see as he'd be much the better off for that. A foreman, if he's got a conscience and delights in his work, will do his business as well as if he was a partner. I wouldn't give a penny for a man as 'ud drive a nail in slack because he didn't get extra pay for it." And so Adam Bede stands out as the living embodi¬ment of the faithful, diligent, painstaking working¬man with the skill and conscience to do well the task that lies before him, and with an honest pride in the work he has got to do. The world is the richer for such men, and the work of their brains has guided well the hands of other men.
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Is this spirit dying out amongst us ? And if so, may it not be that our whole education, both at home and at school, is rapidly being pushed forward on wrong lines ?
Both at work and play it is clear that extra in-ducements must be held out to young people to lead them to do their best. Boys at school work hard, not for learning's sake, but for the value of the prizes. Boys and men play games, not for the glory of the thing, and with a keen desire to excel, but because of the commercial gain that results.
Now if all this plainly leads to the deterioration of the national character, by basing effort on the hope of getting rather than on the hope of excelling, can we wonder that envy and unrest and discontent are so rapidly increasing all around us ?
I would plead most earnestly with parents and teachers to come back to the higher ideal of life and duty, which alone can give us men of character and grit like the men who made famous the Anglo-Saxon race by land and sea—as Builders of Empire and as Rulers of men.
Professor Huxley has said that the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make your¬self "do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not." It is the first lesson that ought to be learned, and it is per¬haps the last lesson we learn thoroughly. The great theologian and distinguished mathematician, Dr.
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Salmon, late Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, was wont to say that the only thing he ever learned at school was "to do what he didn't like," and that the learning of it had stood him in good stead all his life.
But side by side with this great object in the training of the young ought to be kept steadily in view the encouragement of finding joy in doing one's own work well. It is better and grander to succeed as a hodman than to fail as an architect ! The old system of apprentices and guilds gave men an honest pride in their work, and joy in its success.
Lord Avebury not unwisely speaks of "the happi¬ness of Duty and the duty of Happiness." Nor can we forget how work happily done brings a blessed influence to bear on others round about us. Robert Browning has well illustrated this in the poem "Pippa Passes." He pictures in a charming idyll the idea of a humble soul, unknown in the great world, touching other lives at critical periods in their history and influencing them for good. Pippa is a lowly worker at the mills of Asolo, in northern Italy, "who winds silk the whole year round to earn just bread and milk," and when her one annual holiday comes she goes out singing in joyous inno¬cence, and the theme of the song with which she begins and ends her day of joy and gladness is this:
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"All service ranks the same with God:
If now, as formerly He trod
Paradise, His presence fills
Our earth, each only as God wills
Can work—God's puppets best and worst,
Are we ; there is no last nor first.
God's in His heaven—All's right with the world! "
And as Pippa passes, singing, her joyous innocence and song of hope roused the slumbering conscience of an abandoned woman; fired the patriotism of a misguided youth; and stayed the hand of Monsignor the Bishop as with his Intendant he plotted a cold and cruel murder. And yet she lies down to rest at night all unconscious that her life has determined the lives of others. It is this far-reaching conse¬quence of our acts that gives dignity and importance to the humblest duty well and honourably fulfilled. "Blessed," wrote Carlyle, "is the man who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness."
Here is the lesson of Duty.
DUTY TO SELF.—" Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control."
DUTY TO OUR NEIGHBOUR.—The Spectator lately told of a young surgeon in one of the London hospitals who sucked the poison out of a child's wound, and who both died himself and failed to save the child's life; and the comment of the Spectator was, that while men saw only the waste of a valued
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life the angels saw a young man enter into perfect life with a living child in his arms.
DUTY TO GOD.—The teaching of the whole Bible is to lead us to say, "0 God, I belong to Thee ; 0 God, I give myself to Thee ; 0 God, help me to serve Thee faithfully and to do Thy will."
But the child must be taught by example and by precept, and, if need be, by punishment, that future character rather than present enjoyment is the highest aim of the discipline of the Home and of the School.
We are justly proud of the men who have made England what she is to-day, and who carried the banner of the Cross from land to land. But do we try to imitate their self-sacrifice and devotion to duty ?
The age wants MEN, strong men, loving duty more than ease; and ready rather to serve than to squeeze the State.
The ancient Greeks taught men to strive, not for gate-money or for a lucrative post, but for honour, and for the glory of the State. The perishable garland of olive cut with a golden sickle from the sacred tree was the most coveted prize at the Olympic games. We have changed all this, and hardly for the better, in our national sports. We want to restore the higher ideal of life and duty. But we cannot do so unless in the home and in the school children have been taught that to learn to play the game is better than to win prizes—that the match is of more importance than the result.
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One of the greatest Frenchmen of his time wrote thus of the men and women who saved India, in life and in death, in the awful days of the Mutiny of 1857: "Not one of them shrank or trembled—all, military and civilians, young and old, generals and soldiers, resisted, fought and perished with a coolness and intrepidity which never faltered. . . . It is in this circumstance that shines out the immense value of public education, which invites the English¬man from his youth to make use of his strength and liberty, to associate, resist, fear nothing, to be astonished at nothing, and to save himself by his own sole exertions from every sore strait in life."
God grant to parents and teachers the noble ambition so to train the rising generation of English boys and girls that they may again attain to that glorious ideal and be ready to exhibit it when the call of duty comes.
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