Part 11 (2/2)
For the most part, we sympathized with the boys, and confess that at our hotel we kept careful watch of the bulletin to see whose boat came in ahead. We are disposed to applaud anything that will give our young men muscular development. Students have such a tendency to lounge, and mope, and chew, and eat almond-nuts at midnight, and read novels after they go to bed, the candlestick set up on Webster's dictionary or the Bible, that we prize anything that makes them cautious about their health, as they must be if they would enter the list of contestants. How many of our country boys enter the freshman cla.s.s of college in robust health, which lasts them about a twelvemonth; then in the soph.o.m.ore they lose their liver; in the junior they lose their stomach; in the senior they lose their back bone; graduating skeletons, more fit for an anatomical museum than the bar or pulpit.
”Midnight oil,” so much eulogized, is the poorest kind of kerosene. Where hard study kills one student, bad habits kill a hundred. Kirk White, while at Cambridge, wrote beautiful hymns; but if he had gone to bed at ten o'clock that night instead of three o'clock the next morning, he would have been of more service to the world and a healthier example to all collegians. Much of the learning of the day is morbid, and much of the religion bilious. We want, first of all, a clean heart, and next a strong stomach. Falling from grace is often chargeable to derangement of gastric juices. Oar and bat may become salutary weapons.
But, after all, there was something wrong about those summer boat-races. A student with a stout arm, and great girth, and full chest, and nothing else, is not at all admirable. Mind and body need to be driven tandem, the body for the wheel horse and the intellect the leader. We want what is now proposed in some directions--a grand collegiate literary race. Let the mental contest be on the same week with the muscular. Let Yale and Harvard and Williams and Princeton and Dartmouth see who has the champion among scholars. Let there be a Waterloo in belles-lettres and rhetoric and mathematics and philosophy. Let us see whether the students of Doctors McCosh, or Porter, or Campbell, or Smith are most worthy to wear the belt.
About twelve o'clock at noon let the literary flotilla start prow and prow, oar-lock and oar-lock. Let Helicon empty its waters to swell the river of knowledge on which they row. Right foot on right rib of the boat, and left foot on the left rib--bend into it, my hearties, bend!--and our craft come out four lengths ahead.
Give the brain a chance as well as the arm. Do not let the animal eat up the soul. Let the body be the well-fas.h.i.+oned hulk, and the mind the white sails, all hoisted, everything, from flying jib to spanker, bearing on toward the harbor of glorious achievement. When that boat starts, we want to be on the bank to cheer, and after sundown help fill the air with sky-rockets.
”By the way,” I said, ”Governor Wiseman, do you not think that we need more out-door exercise, and that contact with the natural world would have a cheering tendency? Governor, do you ever have the blues?”
The governor, putting his knife across the plate and throwing his spectacles up on his forehead, replied:
Almost every nature, however sprightly, sometimes will drop into a minor key, or a subdued mood that in common parlance is recognized as ”the blues.” There may be no adverse causes at work, but somehow the bells of the soul stop ringing, and you feel like sitting quiet, and you strike off fifty per cent from all your worldly and spiritual prospects. The immediate cause may be a northeast wind, or a balky liver, or an enlarged spleen, or pickled oysters at twelve o'clock the night before.
In such depressed state no one can afford to sit for an hour. First of all let him get up and go out of doors. Fresh air, and the faces of cheerful men, and pleasant women, and frolicsome children, will in fifteen minutes kill moping. The first moment your friend strikes the keyboard of your soul it will ring music. A hen might as well try on populous Broadway to hatch out a feathery group as for a man to successfully brood over his ills in lively society. Do not go for relief among those who feel as badly as you do. Let not toothache, and rheumatism, and hypochondria go to see toothache, rheumatism and hypochondria. On one block in Brooklyn live a doctor, an undertaker and a clergyman. That is not the row for a nervous man to walk on, lest he soon need all three. Throw back all the shutters of your soul and let the sunlight of genial faces s.h.i.+ne in.
Besides that, why sit ye here with the blues, ye favored sons and daughters of men? Shone upon by such stars, and breathed on by such air, and sung to by so many pleasant sounds, you ought not to be seen moping. Especially if light from the better world strikes its aurora through your night sky, ought you be cheerful. You can afford to have a rough luncheon by the way if it is soon to end amid the banqueters in white. Sailing toward such a blessed port, do not have your flag at half mast. Leave to those who take too much wine ”the gloomy raven tapping at the chamber door, on the night's Plutonian sh.o.r.e,” and give us the robin red-breast and the chaffinch. Let some one with a strong voice give out the long-metre doxology, and the whole world ”Praise G.o.d, from whom all blessings flow.”
”But do you not suppose, Governor Wiseman, that every man has his irritated days?”
Yes, yes, responded the governor. There are times when everything seems to go wrong. From seven o'clock a.m. till ten p.m. affairs are in a twist. You rise in the morning, and the room is cold, and a b.u.t.ton is off, and the breakfast is tough, and the stove smokes, and the pipes burst, and you start down the street nettled from head to foot. All day long things are adverse. Insinuations, petty losses, meanness on the part of customers. The ink bottle upsets and spoils the carpet. Some one gives a wrong turn to the damper, and the gas escapes. An agent comes in determined to insure your life, when it is already insured for more than it is worth, and you are afraid some one will knock you on the head to get the price of your policy; but he sticks to you, showing you pictures of old Time and the hour-gla.s.s, and Death's scythe and a skeleton, making it quite certain that you will die before your time unless you take out papers in his company.
Besides this, you have a cold in your head, and a grain of dirt in your eye, and you are a walking uneasiness. The day is out of joint, and no surgeon can set it.
The probability is that if you would look at the weather-vane you would find that the wind is northeast, and you might remember that you have lost much sleep lately. It might happen to be that you are out of joint instead of the day. Be careful and not write many letters while you are in that irritated mood. You will pen some things that you will be sorry for afterward.
Let us remember that these spiked nettles of life are part of our discipline. Life would get nauseating if it were all honey. That table would be poorly set that had on it nothing but treacle. We need a little vinegar, mustard, pepper and horse-radish that brings the tears even when we do not feel pathetic. If this world were all smoothness, we would never be ready for emigration to a higher and better. Bl.u.s.tering March and weeping April prepare us for s.h.i.+ning May. This world is a poor hitching post. Instead of tying fast on the cold mountains, we had better whip up and hasten on toward the warm inn where our good friends are looking out of the window, watching to see us come up.
Interrupting the governor at this point, we asked him if he did not think that rowing, ball playing and other athletic exercises might be made an antidote to the morbid religion that is sometimes manifest. The governor replied:
No doubt much of the Christian character of the day lacks in swarthiness and power. It is gentle enough, and active enough, and well meaning enough, but is wanting in moral muscle. It can sweetly sing at a prayer meeting, and smile graciously when it is the right time to smile, and makes an excellent nurse to pour out with steady hand a few drops of peppermint for a child that feels disturbances under the waistband, but has no qualification for the robust Christian work that is demanded.
One reason for this is the ineffable softness of much of what is called Christian literature. The attempt is to bring us up on tracts made up of thin exhortations and goodish maxims. A nerveless treatise on commerce or science in that style would be crumpled up by the first merchant and thrown into his waste-basket. Religious twaddle is of no more use than worldly twaddle. If a man has nothing to say, he had better keep his pen wiped and his tongue still. There needs an infusion of strong Anglo-Saxon into religious literature, and a brawnier manliness and more impatience with insipidity, though it be prayerful and sanctimonious. He who stands with irksome repet.i.tions asking people to ”Come to Jesus,” while he gives no strong common-sense reason why they should come, drives back the souls of men. If, with all the thrilling realities of eternity at hand, a man has nothing to write which can gather up and master the thoughts and feelings of men, his writing and speaking are a slander on the religion which he wishes to eulogize.
Morbidity in religion might be partially cured by more out-door exercise.
There are some duties we can perform better on our feet than on our knees.
If we carry the grace of G.o.d with us down into every-day practical Christian work, we will get more spiritual strength in five minutes than by ten hours of kneeling. If Daniel had not served G.o.d save when three times a day he wors.h.i.+ped toward the temple, the lions would have surely eaten him up. The school of Christ is as much out-of-doors as in-doors. Hard, rough work for G.o.d will develop an athletic soul. Religion will not conquer either the admiration or the affections of men by effeminacy, but by strength. Because the heart is soft is no reason why the head should be soft. The spirit of genuine religion is a spirit of great power. When Christ rides in apocalyptic vision, it is not on a weak and stupid beast, but on a horse--emblem of majesty and strength: ”And he went forth conquering and to conquer.”
CHAPTER XL.
WARM-WEATHER RELIGION.
It takes more grace to be an earnest and useful Christian in summer than in any other season. The very dest.i.tute, through lack of fuel and thick clothing, may find the winter the trying season, but those comfortably circ.u.mstanced find summer the Thermopylae that tests their Christian courage and endurance.
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