Chapter 60
Scholars often leave their health, their happiness, their usefulness behind, in their great eagerness to drink deep draughts at wisdom's fountain. Professional men often sacrifice everything that is valuable in life for the sake of reputation, influence, and money. Business men sacrifice home, family, health, happiness, in the great struggle for money and power. The American prize, like the pearl in the oyster, is very attractive, but is too often the result of disease.
Charles Linnaeus, the great naturalist, so exhausted his brain by over-exertion that he could not recognize his own work, and even forgot his own name. Kirk White won the prize at Cambridge, but it cost him his life. He studied at night and forced his brain by stimulants and narcotics in his endeavor to pull through, but he died at twenty-four.
Paley died at sixty-two of overwork. He was called "one of the sublimest spirits in the world."
President Timothy Dwight of Yale College nearly killed himself by overwork when a young man. When at Yale he studied nine hours, taught six hours a day, and took no exercise whatever. He could not be induced to stop until he became so nervous and irritable that he was unable to look at a book ten minutes a day. His mind gave way, and it was a long time before he fully recovered.
Imagine the surprise of the angels at the death of men and women in the early prime and vigor of life. Could we but read the notes of their autopsies we might say less of mysterious Providence at funerals. They would run somewhat as follows:--
NOTES FROM THE ANGELS' AUTOPSIES.
What, is it returned so soon?--a body framed for a century's use returned at thirty?--a temple which was twenty-eight years in building destroyed almost before it was completed? What have gray hairs, wrinkles, a bent form, and death to do with youth?
Has all this beauty perished like a bud just bursting into bloom, plucked by the grim destroyer? Has she fallen a victim to tight-lacing, over-excitement, and the gaiety and frivolity of fas.h.i.+onable life?
Here is an educated, refined woman who died of lung starvation. What a tax human beings pay for breathing impure air! Nature provides them with a tonic atmosphere, compounded by the divine Chemist, but they refuse to breathe it in its purity, and so must pay the penalty in shortened lives. They can live a long time without water, a longer time without food, clothing, or the so-called comforts of life; they can live without education or culture, but their lungs must have good, healthful air-food twenty-four thousand times a day if they would maintain health. Oh, that they would see, as we do, the intimate connection between bad air, bad morals, and a tendency to crime!
Here are the ruins of an idolized son and loving husband. Educated and refined, what infinite possibilities beckoned him onward at the beginning of his career! But the Devil's agent offered him imagination, sprightliness, wit, eloquence, bodily strength, and happiness in _eau de vie_, or "water of life," as he called it, at only fifteen cents a gla.s.s. The best of our company tried to dissuade him, but to no avail. The poor mortal closed his "bargain" with the dramseller, and what did he get? A hardened conscience, a ruined home, a diseased body, a muddled brain, a heartbroken wife, wretched children, disappointed friends, triumphant enemies, days of remorse, nights of anguish, an unwept deathbed, an unhonored grave. And only to think that he is only one of many thousands! "What fools these mortals be!"
Did he not see the destruction toward which he was rus.h.i.+ng with all the feverish haste of slavish appet.i.te? Ah, yes, but only when it was too late. In his clenched hand, as he lay dead, was found a crumpled paper containing the following, in lines barely legible so tremulous were the nerves of the writer: "Wife, children, and over forty thousand dollars all gone! I alone am responsible. All has gone down my throat. When I was twenty-one I had a fortune. I am not yet thirty-five years old.
I have killed my beautiful wife, who died of a broken heart; have murdered our children with neglect. When this coin is gone I do not know how I can get my next meal. I shall die a drunken pauper. This is my last money, and my history. If this bill comes into the hands of any man who drinks, let him take warning from my
What a magnificent specimen of manhood this would have been if his life had been under the rule of reason, not pa.s.sion! He dies of old age at forty, his hair is gray, his eyes are sunken, his complexion sodden, his body marked with the labels of his disease. A physique fit for a G.o.d, fas.h.i.+oned in the Creator's image, with infinite possibilities, a physiological hulk wrecked on pa.s.sion's seas, and fit only for a danger signal to warn the race. What would parents think of a captain who would leave his son in charge of a s.h.i.+p without giving him any instructions or chart showing the rocks, reefs, and shoals? Do they not know that those who sleep in the ocean are but a handful compared with those who have foundered on pa.s.sion's seas? Oh, the sins of silence which parents commit against those dearer to them than life itself! Youth can not understand the great solicitude of parents regarding their education, their a.s.sociations, their welfare generally, and the mysterious silence in regard to their physical natures. An intelligent explanation, by all mothers to the daughters and by all fathers to the sons, of the mysteries of their physical lives, when at the right age, would revolutionize civilization.
This young clergyman killed himself trying to be popular. This student committed suicide by exhausting his brain in trying to lead his cla.s.s.
This young lawyer overdrew his account at Nature's bank, and she foreclosed by a stroke of paralysis.
This merchant died at thirty-five by his own hand. His life was slipping away without enjoyment. He had murdered his capacity for happiness, and dug his own spiritual grave while making preparations for enjoying life. This young society man died of nothing to do and dissipation, at thirty.
What a miserable farce the life of men and women seems to us! Time, which is so precious that even the Creator will not give a second moment until the first is gone, they throw away as though it were water. Opportunities which angels covet they fling away as of no consequence, and die failures, because they have "no chance in life."
Life, which seems so precious to us, they spurn as if but a bauble.
Scarcely a mortal returns to us who has not robbed himself of years of precious life. Scarcely a man returns to us dropping off in genuine old age, as autumn leaves drop in the forest.
Has life become so cheap that mortals thus throw it away?
CHAPTER XLVII
HABIT--THE SERVANT,--THE MASTER
Habit, if wisely and skilfully formed, becomes truly a second nature.--BACON.
Habit, with its iron sinews, Clasps and leads us day by day.
LAMARTINE.
The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.--HAZLITT.
You can not, in any given case, by any sudden and single effort, will to be true, if the habit of your life has been insincerity.--F. W.
ROBERTSON.
It is a beautiful provision in the mental and moral arrangement of our nature, that that which is performed as a duty may by frequent repet.i.tion, become a habit; and the habit of stern virtue, so repulsive to others, may hang around our neck like a wreath of flowers.--PAXTON HOOD.
"When shall I begin to train my child?" asked a young mother of a learned physician.
"How old is the child?" inquired the doctor.
"Two years, sir."
"Then you have lost just two years," replied he, gravely.
"You must begin with his grandmother," said Oliver Wendell Holmes, when asked a similar question.
"At the mouth of the Mississippi," says Beecher, "how impossible would it be to stay its waters, and to separate from each other the drops from the various streams that have poured in on either side,--of the Red River, the Arkansas, the Ohio, and the Missouri,--or to sift, grain by grain the particles of sand that have been washed from the Alleghany, or the Rocky Mountains; yet how much more impossible would it be when character is the river, and habits are the side-streams!"
"We sow an act, we reap a habit; we sow a habit, we reap a character."
While correct habits depend largely on self-discipline, and often on self-denial, bad habits, like weeds, spring up, unaided and untrained, to choke the plants of virtue and as with Canada thistles, allowed to go to seed in a fair meadow, we may have "one day's seeding, ten years'
weeding."
We seldom see much change in people after they get to be twenty-five or thirty years of age, except in going further in the way they have started; but it is a great comfort to think that, when one is young, it is almost as easy to acquire a good habit as a bad one, and that it is possible to be hardened in goodness as well as in evil.
Take good care of the first twenty years of your life, and you may hope that the last twenty will take good care of you.
A writer on the history of Staffords.h.i.+re tells of an idiot who, living near a town clock, and always amusing himself by counting the hour of the day whenever the clock struck, continued to strike and count the hour correctly without its aid, when at one time it happened to be injured by an accident.
Dr. Johnson had acquired the habit of touching every post he pa.s.sed in the street; and, if he missed one, he was uneasy, irritable, and nervous till he went back and touched the neglected post.
"Even thought is but a habit."
Heredity is a man's habit transmitted to his offspring.
A special study of hereditary drunkenness has been made by Professor Pellman of Bonn University, Germany. He thus traced the careers of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in all parts of the present German Empire, until he was able to present tabulated biographies of the hundreds descended from some original drunkard.
Notable among the persons described by Professor Pellman is Frau Ada Jurke, who was born in 1740, and was a drunkard, a thief, and a tramp for the last forty years of her life, which ended in 1800. Her descendants numbered 834, of whom 709 were traced in local records from youth to death. One hundred and six of the 709 were born out of wedlock. There were 144 beggars, and 62 more who lived from charity.
Of the women, 181 led disreputable lives. There were in the family 76 convicts, 7 of whom were sentenced for murder. In a period of some seventy-five years, this one family rolled up a bill of costs in almshouses, prisons, and correctional inst.i.tutions amounting to at least 5,000,000 marks, or about $1,250,000.
Isaac Watts had a habit of rhyming. His father grew weary of it, and set out to punish him, which made the boy cry out:--
"Pray, father, on me mercy take, And I will no more verses make."
A minister had a bad habit of exaggeration, which seriously impaired his usefulness. His brethren came to expostulate. With extreme humiliation over this fault as they set it forth, he said, "Brethren, I have long mourned over this fault, and I have shed _barrels of tears_ because of it." They gave him up as incorrigible.
Men carelessly or playfully get into habits of speech or act which become so natural that they speak or act as they do not intend, to their discomfiture. Professor Phelps told of some Andover students, who, for sport, interchanged the initial consonants of adjacent words.
"But," said he, "retribution overtook them. On a certain morning, when one of them was leading the devotions, he prayed the Lord to 'have mercy on us, feak and weeble sinners.'" The habit had come to possess him.
Many speakers have undesirable habits of utterance or gesture. Some are continually applying the hand to some part of the face, the chin, the whiskers; some give the nose a peck with thumb and forefinger; others have the habit characterized as,--