It was a well-seasoned parson who once remarked that he made it a point never to speak in public without taking a text. It mattered not whether it was an after-dinner speech, a Fourth of July oration or a sermon, he always took a text, that he might be sure, as he said, to “give the people something worth remembering.”
In imitation of his pious example I will take a text. You will find my text in the book of Numbers, the first chapter and the second verse. It reads like this—“Two and two make four.” That particular statement does not happen to be in the Bible, but it is as true as anything which is found there, and it will serve as a basis for what I wish to say regarding the law of returns.
Two and two make four. Never by any sort of bad luck or ill chance only three and a half; never by any amount of pulling or stretching or coaxing four and a half, but always and everywhere just four and no more! It is a definite, absolute statement of fact. It always has been so and it always will be so. No one can imagine a world where two and two will not make four.
If a man deposits two dollars in the bank today and two tomorrow, he can draw out four the third day. In forty years from that time he can still draw out exactly four dollars and whatever interest upon his original deposit the bank may allow. Life is like that. With what measure we mete, it is measured back to us again. We get out of life what we put in, by a law as definite and as unyielding as the statement about two and two. There are no Santa Clauses lurking in the shadow—each individual takes out of the big stocking what has been previously put in, not by magic, but by solid and verifiable effort.
Once for all dismiss the idea that success in life is the result of luck or pull or any such artificial thing. There was a man in San Francisco who once picked up a five dollar gold piece in the street-car. He was a poor man and it was a great find for him. He thenceforth spent a large part of his time studying the floor of the street-car, peering in and out among the feet of the passengers, to find another gold piece. He never found another one, but the time wasted, if it had been given to thought and effort touching his own trade, would have earned for him many an extra gold piece. Now and then something may occur which men call “luck,” but it offers nothing reliable by which one may safely shape his course.
Young men and maidens look for four-leaf clovers on the lawn. They are commonly intent upon something else besides the clover as they creep about on their hands and knees—something sweeter and more satisfying than clover, and they find this too. Occasionally they do find a four-leaf clover, but the clover which makes the lawn green, feeds the cows, supplies the bees with honey and fills the haymow, is three-leaf clover—the ordinary, every-day sort of clover. The farmer, the dairyman, and the bee all know that the reliable and satisfying returns in life come not by some happy chance, but in those common and usual events which are according to law.
When the blood is warm, the heart beating high and fast, the nerves eager to yield their thrills, young people see visions and dream dreams. It ought to be so. The girl who does not have her day-dreams is no girl at all. The boy who does not see ahead of him shapes and forms of activity, achievement, advance, higher and more commanding than the Sierra, if not quite so solid, does not deserve to be young. The loftier, the richer, the rosier these day-dreams, the better!
But those visions will have to be worked out and realized, in so far as they come to have a definite, ascertainable value, in a world of plain, hard fact. The girl will marry a man with feet and hands like the rest of us; and the home she has, the place she makes for herself in society, the record of useful service she writes opposite her name, will be determined according to law. And the place in the world’s life which the boy carves out for himself as he climbs toward maturity, the size of it, the location of it, the comfort of it, will be the inevitable reaction from wise and useful effort. The law of returns is as sure as the statement about two and two making four.
We find this made plain in several directions—first of all in the gaining and maintenance of sound health. Genuine achievement in many lines becomes in the last analysis largely a question of nerves, digestion, physical stamina. In the busy, hurried city life the question is, “Can this man stand up to it as long and as effectively as any other man—and then just that much longer which gives him preeminence?” The lawyer must be able to go into court day after day clear-headed, so that he will have all the law he knows at his command, patient and smooth with blundering witnesses, wise and self-controlled in the face of the nagging of the opposing counsel; he must be able to do this all day long for weeks together, looking up his authorities at night oftentimes, and not break down. The physician must do something more than ride around in an automobile and look wise; he must be able to carry upon his mind and heart the anxieties of a hundred households at once, work all day, frequently half the night, eating and sleeping as he can, and do all this without resorting to stimulants or drugs to keep himself up to the mark. The teacher bent not on imparting information or on merely keeping the wheels of a pedagogical machine turning, but upon the high task of forming, developing, enriching personality in fifty or sixty restless lives there in plain view, needs a sound physique. The minister of religion if he is to stand up before the same congregation for a score of years or more and put faith, hope, courage, heart, and resolution into them and not become fagged out and stale, must be a man who can sleep nights, digest his meals, maintain his poise, rise early, and go all day without losing his head or his health—and for all this he needs a prime body. The same is true in the life of the merchant or the mechanic, in the work of the manufacturer or the farmer.
Henry Ward Beecher used to say that there were three kinds of people in the world—the sick people who must be taken care of with sympathetic tenderness; the people who are not sick, able to be up and to take their nourishment; and the people who are positively, radiantly, and joyously well. If the young man has not been handicapped by some accident or by an unfortunate heredity, it lies easily within his power to be enrolled in this third class. He ought to hold himself resolutely unwilling to accept anything less.
It is much more than a matter of personal prudence or of self-interest. Up to the limit of his powers each man owes it to his family, to his friends, and to the world about him to furnish it one more healthy, vigorous life. The world is defrauded if by his foolishness, dissipation, or laziness it is put off with a whining, grumbling, irritable caricature of what the man might have been. He owes it to the members of his family not to burden them with unnecessary doctor’s bills, nursing, and anxiety. He owes it to them not to break down and die before his time, leaving them to struggle on alone. Good, sound health, clear up to the limit of what intelligence, conscience, and that resolution which will not take “no” for an answer may achieve, becomes a moral obligation! The man who shirks this physical duty becomes to that extent a scamp.
Such physical efficiency comes not as a piece of good luck; nor is disease to be regarded always as a misfortune or “a mysterious dispensation of providence.” The man careless about the drainage or thoughtlessly allowing decaying vegetables to lie in the cellar of his home need not prate about “providence” if fever attacks some member of his household. The man who eats hot biscuits three times a day and drinks coffee by the quart until he is as yellow as a Chinaman has no right to shake his head over “the mysterious ways of God,” when he becomes ill. The young fellow who inhales whole fog-banks of cigarette smoke until his lungs are weak and his heart action defective, who tampers with his nerves by the use of stimulants or narcotics, need not be surprised that in the hard contests of life sounder men walk on ahead, leaving him in the rear. In each case the man forgot that two and two make four, that we must settle by the books, that according to the law of returns we take out what we put in.
Physical efficiency cannot be hastily bought in the drug store at a dollar a bottle any more than women can buy good complexions there for fifty cents a box. Beauty is more than skin deep; it roots all the way down into those vital processes which give the fair woman the appearance and the reality of joyous, engaging health. And the physical efficiency which stands the strain of modern life cannot be rapidly gained by the use of drugs; it comes according to the law of definite returns. It comes only as men eat good food, enough and not too much, drink that which slakes rather than creates thirst, sleep a sufficient number of hours, some of them before midnight, breathe their full share of the outdoor air where there is plenty for everybody, and exercise themselves sanely in some wholesome industry. It all comes according to method and not by magic.
The newspapers on the morning after the presidential election of nineteen hundred brought us an interesting picture. One of the candidates for vice-president that year had been traveling for weeks together, speaking ten or fifteen times a day to great audiences eager to drain him of his last drop of vitality. He had been meeting influential citizens by the hundreds, shaking hands with them until his right arm might have felt like the handle of some outworn town pump. He had been doing all this under the constant strain of tremendous excitement and personal interest. A man who had wasted his strength in vicious indulgences would have lasted about as long in such a situation as an old lady would last in a football game. This man went through it without breaking down, without losing his head or making foolish, damaging statements. And when the reporters went to call on him the night of the election they found him in evening dress, rejoicing in the companionship of his family, from whom he had been separated for those weeks, calmly awaiting the returns. Theodore Roosevelt—whether we agree with all his policies or not, we admire a vigorous, intelligent, public-spirited American citizen wherever found! He entered college a delicate lad. He gained and maintained that splendid efficiency by remembering that two and two make four. He was willing to pay the full price for virility by his steady attention to the law of returns.
The same rule holds in the mental field. There are men who fall into the way of relying upon what they are pleased to call “genius.” A bad case of “genius” in a young man is almost as fatal to his highest success as smallpox. There are a few men in each generation exceptionally endowed, just as there are a few four-leaf clovers in every field, but the work of the world is done mainly by men of average build.
And even men of undeniable genius attribute their success mainly to persistent effort. Agassiz used to say, “I seem to have formed the habit of observing more closely than many of my associates.” Darwin, whose work was epoch making, made that famous trip for observation on H. M. S. Beagle in 1837. In 1844 he ventured to show a few of his notes to some intimate friends. In 1859, twenty-two years after he had collected the first data for the theory finally announced, he published “The Origin of Species,” and the world of science, of philosophy, of religion, underwent a radical change as a result of his thorough work.
Ask ninety-nine men out of a hundred how they succeeded and the answer will come back—“Hard work.” Inspiration is all very well, but for the mass of us perspiration is a surer pathway to achievement. Wellington, Newton, Lord Clive, Napoleon, Walter Scott, Daniel Webster were all regarded as dull boys—in each case advancement came by persistent effort. The capacity was there, but it was brought out not by magic nor by some sudden burst of inspiration, but by hard work.
Knowledge is power, where the knowledge is not a mere mass of information. The mere accumulation of facts has little worth, for all this lies ready to our hand in the encyclopedia whenever it is needed. The knowledge which brings power lies in the ability to read and to know what it is all about and how it bears on other things we have read; in the ability to think and when one thinks to produce something with the look and taste of his own mind upon it; in the ability to see three things, sharply distinguishing them, and then to see them in their relations, and then to see another group of three and another, organizing the whole nine into some sort of system. The knowledge which is power means insight, grasp, discrimination, productiveness. It is not the sole property of genius, but rather the natural return for a long life of consistent, intellectual effort.
Each man owes it to society to make his utmost effort to furnish it one more such well-equipped member. This purpose includes much more than the desire for that individual success and preeminence which might prompt the effort—it indicates a wish to be capable and serviceable to those larger interests which lag for lack of competent service.
When Booker Washington addresses the students gathered at Tuskegee, it is after this fashion. “You have not come here to receive training in order that you may go back and compete more successfully with your untrained associates, in earning higher wages to feather your own nests quickly and warmly. You have not come here to become intelligent and cultivated that you may go back and proudly establish better homes and higher types of family life than the untutored negroes maintain. You are here that being trained you may feel more heavily and capably responsible for the welfare of your race in the several communities where you are to live and work.” If this is the splendid ideal in the green tree of a black man’s school, what shall we expect in the dry tree of the white man’s school! The high office of all mental drill should be to send men out “more heavily and capably responsible” for the general good, and this high quality of competency comes only by strict attention to the law of returns.
The same method holds in moral values although many people feel that here we enter a region of hocus-pocus, a realm of magic and sleight of hand where two and two may possibly, upon occasion, make five or even fifty. There is an impression in some quarters that a young fellow may sow an abundant crop of wild oats, that he may wallow in the mire of vicious indulgence, that he may for years disregard his spiritual interests with flat indifference, and then by some sudden spasm of moral feeling begin anew, as fine and as sound a man as if he had never been in the far country with the harlots and the swine.
The standard books on ethics give us no hint that such is the fact. The Bible says nothing in support of such a notion. There is not a land the sun shines on where two and two do not make four in morals as well as in mathematics. There are no short cuts to spiritual soundness. The Almighty is a careful bookkeeper and the teaching of reason, experience, and conscience is to the effect that here, as everywhere, we must accept those reactions which come inevitably by this great law of returns.
There was a missionary to the Indians who, in seeking to induce habits of Sabbath observance, told them that if they planted their corn on Sunday it would not grow. In that spirit of human perversity which we all understand and share, they immediately went out and planted an acre of corn on Sunday! They hoed it and tended it always on Sunday. And because they took especial pains with it, when autumn came it yielded more corn than any other acre on the reservation. Then the Indians laughed at the good missionary and would not go to church.
There is a penalty for planting and hoeing corn on Sunday, but it does not show in the corn—it shows in the men. The corn may grow to its full size, but the men will not grow to their full size, nor yield the full return appropriate to the cultivation of human values. The missionary was sound in his main purpose, but faulty in his method, because in the moral world as elsewhere, we find the reign of law and not the operation of magic. The neglect of the higher values for which the Sabbath stands will not at once affect the cornfield, but it will show in the spiritual deficiencies of the men who have no place in the week for the cultivation of reverence, aspiration, and the sense of fellowship with the Unseen.
There is no shuffling nor chance in the moral world. Impulses lead to choices; choices readily become habits; habits harden speedily into character, and character determines destiny. Two and two make four all the way up, all the way down, and all the way in.
In a New York hotel the chambermaid one morning discovered the dead body of a young man and at his side, scrawled on a piece of paper, she found this last will and testament: “I leave to society a bad example. I leave to my father and mother all the sorrow they can bear in their old age. I leave to my brothers and sisters the memory of a misspent life. I leave to my wife a broken heart and to my children the name of a drunkard and a suicide. I leave to God a lost soul which has defied and insulted his loving mercy.”
He wrote it all out, signed it, and then shot himself. His appetites had gotten away with him, his habits were no longer under his control. He began as many an enthusiastic, generous young fellow begins by simply having a succession of “good times” and they grew on him until the habits he had developed were no longer his—he was theirs. He forgot that two and two make four, and the gruesome legacy he was compelled to leave issued as inevitably from his course of life as the sum total at the foot of a column of figures.
The sound health which serves as the physical basis of enlarging and enduring efficiency; the trained intelligence which knows what to do next and finds itself competent for the task; the type of character which is reliable and profitable for the life that now is and for that which is to come, all come to us as splendid reactions from that stable, definite, methodical order, seen and unseen, which enfolds us ever. What you receive as the natural rebound from your mode of life will be like in quality and proportionate in amount to that which you express in effort, for the law of returns, like the law of gravitation, is always on duty.