The man who said, “I am doing a great work, I cannot come down,” was laying bricks. But the bricks went into a wall, and the wall surrounded the capital city of his country as its main defense, and the city was Jerusalem, the headquarters of the Hebrew people! The moral history of that people has woven itself into the story of the world’s redemption, as has no other history on earth. Its writings furnish us the best book we have: its Messiah, born in Bethlehem of Judea, has become the world’s Saviour; and the high claim that “Salvation is of the Jews,” is well sustained by the facts. Simple deeds are sometimes far-reaching in their divine significance. Laying bricks in a wall which protected the city out of which came the world’s Messiah, was surely a splendid occupation. The man was well within the facts, when he cried to those who tried to interrupt him, “I am doing a great work, I cannot come down.”
I quote these words as indicating the sense of vocation, the honest pride in his work, the personal appreciation of its wider meanings, the safeguard it affords against unworthy ideals, the means of culture it opens for moral character, which ought to be found in every one’s attitude toward his life-work. Alas for you, if you cannot all say, by and by, what the bricklayer said!
Some college men unfortunately allow themselves to be driven into this or that occupation by force of circumstances. They forget that college training ought to fit us to oppose circumstances if need be and resolutely work out some splendid purpose in the teeth of opposition.
Some college men drift into anything that offers—they must do something to earn their bread and they catch the nearest way. This puts them on a level with the hungry dog looking for a bone and facing in whatever direction he smells meat. Such men are opportunists all their lives, taking whatever offers, even though on the face of it a temporary makeshift, trusting that when one job is finished another may turn up. They are like so many fleas, jumping from job to job, wherever they see a chance for a good bite. They fail to exercise that power of choice and determination which ought to prevail in the selection of that which is to claim six-sevenths of one’s time and interest during all his working years.
There is spiritual value in any legitimate calling, and this satisfying return is open and possible to every college man bent on doing square work. “To every man his work”; his by personal fitness; his by the sense of fulfilling a divine purpose in selecting it; his in the feeling that it belongs to him! Some men are called of God to the Christian ministry and others are no less called of God to teach or to heal or to build. God’s calls announce themselves in a variety of ways. The shining vision that came to Paul on the Damascus road or the mighty spiritual impulse which visited the heart of President Finney of Oberlin as he struggled in the woods alone, are forms of the divine call, but there are other forms equally valid. The call of the world’s need for some special work and your own consciousness of power to render that service will bring you a genuine sense of vocation as you gird yourself for it. There are many intimations as to the place one should take and hold, which may have all the compelling force of a vision from on high.
But to speak more closely of the matter in hand, let me name some of the considerations which must enter into the choice of a life-work. I can only speak in the most general way, addressing as I do young men of varying abilities and temperaments. If one should discuss the value or attractiveness of any particular vocation, the personal element and the question of individual fitness would instantly come in. Some general considerations however may prove suggestive.
It is best not to make one’s decision too early or too rigidly. The average young man is not sufficiently acquainted either with himself or with the vocations to make his final decision during his last year in high school, or during his first year in college. One of the chief values of college training is that it discovers the man to himself. You have scarcely a bowing acquaintance with yourself when you only know yourself as a freshman—wait and meet this same fellow within, as a sophomore, as a junior, as a senior. There are unsuspected capabilities in him which training and experience will bring out.
Wait also until you learn more about the vocations themselves. In making choice of a wife it is well to become acquainted with a number of young ladies before you settle down to an exclusive intimacy with one. There are other girls who can look sweet and say pleasant things too; it is not wise to fall so completely in love with the first dainty bit of white muslin you see as to exclude other delightful associations. The law has its attractions, so has medicine, so has the ministry, so has the work of education, or the business career, or the work of an architect, a chemist, or a forester. It is wise not to conclude too early in life that the attractions of this particular vocation shut out all the rest from consideration. Look yourself over and look the field over with great care at least a hundred times before making a final choice. It will be a sorry thing if you start out to unlock the door of your future with the wrong key.
Consider the whole man in your choice. It is not simply what you carry home in your pocket, as a result of your day’s work and of all the days of work, but what you carry away in mind and heart as well; what you carry away in the gratitude and appreciation of your fellow men; what you gain in the beneficent influence you may exert upon the community through your calling. Ten thousand a year is a splendid return from the investment of one’s personal ability, but there are other returns which may be added to the figures named in your contract in such a way as to make the money consideration seem the small end of it. And there are other returns which may make it seem as if the man who received the ten thousand a year had worked all his life for meager pay. Many a saloon-keeper has made ten times as much money out of his calling as the college professor or the clergyman makes out of his, but when the books are opened, other books as well as the cash book, the comparative values of the vocations will stand revealed.
The young man may be doing some honest and useful work, but without the sense of joy or pride in it. In such event it fails to render him back a full return. The culture of one’s own best life must come with his ordinary work or else the man is sacrificed to the profession. We are not here to be effective machines for grinding out sermons or briefs, operations or lectures, bargains or manufactured products: we are here to be men, strong, fine, aspiring, and useful men. The whole man therefore must be considered, his body, his brain, his heart, and his soul, as well as his purse when you make selection of his life-work. What you make out of your vocation is an important question, but what it makes out of you is tenfold more important!
Make up your mind that in the long run your work will be estimated by its genuine utility. Success comes not by luck, but by law. The apparent exceptions, like four-leaf clovers, are not sufficiently numerous to disturb the principle. It is three-leaf clover that feeds the cows and fills the haymows. It is ordinary industry, fidelity, persistence, and efficiency that bring the largest measure of abiding success. Your work will be estimated by its utility in satisfying human need.
This principle well understood, thoroughly believed, and constantly acted upon, will be of untold value to you. Canfield says to the young men at Columbia, “Measure your daily work by the efficiency and completeness with which it meets the needs of your fellow men.” You must measure it thus, for that is the way the world will estimate it. You will not be able to live by your wits; you must live by your work and your worth. Therefore, in making selection, consider carefully the usefulness of the work you choose, for men are like medicines, when they show themselves useful, they will be used.
The idea that success comes by luck or pull, or chance, is a fool’s idea. Some such instances occur, but they are not even so common as four-leaf clover—the man who starts out in life depending upon them is more foolish than the farmer who would rely upon four-leaf clover for his hay crop. And you will find as you come to live with him on close terms that the world is a very sagacious old fellow in his estimate of values. He has wonderful ability in discerning the real thing and in putting away shoddy. You cannot sell him gold bricks straight along—if now and then one is palmed off on the unwary, still they never become a staple quoted in the market reports. Good clay bricks in the long run are more profitable. Your work will be estimated, and estimated accurately, by its utility in satisfying genuine human need. The intelligent observance of this principle in making your selection will introduce that spirit of service which ennobles the whole effort.
May your choice of vocation be so wise and right that you will be content to have it dominate all minor matters in your life! Horace Bushnell used to speak to Yale men about “the expulsive power of a new affection.” The love for a pure woman making all impurity hateful and disgusting; the love for some man of integrity making all lying and dishonesty seem foul and mean; the love for God making all wrong-doing repulsive! So there comes into the life, by the right choice of vocation, a supreme interest and delight in one’s work, which drives out all the low, cheap, mean things that would hinder it. “I am doing a great work,” the man cries; “I am content to be absorbed in it and it is morally impossible for me to come down to the trivial or the base.”
The famous Vienna surgeon, Dr. Lorenz, at a banquet during his visit to this country, drank nothing but water. The man who sat next him at table, knowing the love which so many Germans have for wine and beer, asked the doctor if he were a teetotaler. The reply was: “I do not know that I could be called that; I am not in any sense a temperance agitator. But I am a surgeon and must keep my brain clear, my nerves steady, my muscles tense.” Here spoke the voice of science on one of its higher levels as to the effect of stimulants! Here spoke also the voice of one who finds splendid moral culture in his devotion to his life-work. “I am doing a great work, known on two continents and beyond,” he seemed to say; “therefore I cannot, for the sake of an abnormal sensation, come down to tickle my stomach, or tamper with my nerves or drug my brain by the use of stimulants.”
Make such a selection of your life-work as will enable you to regard it as the main expression of your spiritual life. Every man, no matter what the special form of his employment may be, can so relate himself to it and so strive to relate it and the results which flow from it, to the life of the community as to make his ordinary work the main utterance of his deeper nature. There will be the expression of his spirituality in worship, in directly religious activity, in other forms of effort, but the main expression should lie in that useful work which claims six-sevenths of his time and strength.
“Give us this day our daily bread,” the Master said in the model prayer. It ought to be the daily utterance of every serious man’s life. Utter it with your lips alone and your body will starve to death! Utter it with hands and brain alone, and your soul will famish! But utter it with your entire nature, hands, brain, heart, and soul, addressing themselves to God, to the resources God has placed at your call, and to the need of the community for the service you can render, and then your prayer will bring the bread which feeds the total nature up to its full strength! Industry, intelligence and moral purpose, cooperating with the divine bounty and with the needs of men, will work out the highest type of character and make one’s daily employment sacramental in its influence upon his own heart and upon the lives of others.
I have not spoken of the claims of the various vocations, but let me utter one last word, as strong as I can make it, for the Christian ministry. There are splendid rewards and honors to be won today at the bar, in medicine, in the work of education, in commerce, in manufacture, in engineering. Into all these callings strong and useful men are going in such numbers that there is no cry of need coming back. It is not so in the ministry. There is in every branch of the Church and in all the states of the Union, a loud and a sore cry for young men of sound health, good sense, trained intelligence, social sympathy, and genuine character, to enter the ministry and furnish the moral and spiritual leadership the country craves. Like the man of Macedonia the modern pulpit stands up and cries, “Come over into Macedonia, and help us.”
If I can read my Church history aright there never was a time when the opportunities and the rewards of the ministry were so great. A man will earn less money in the ministry than the same degree of ability would command in other fields of labor, though congregations, especially in cities, were never so generous with their pastors as now. What he carries away in his purse, however, is only one of many rewards the vocation brings. In the Church today there is liberty of thought; in some branch of it every man desiring to aid his fellows in doing justly, in loving mercy and in walking humbly with God, can find a hearty welcome and a place to work. There is a wide-spread hunger on the part of the people for a competent and helpful interpretation of this literature in the Bible. There is a call for men who can intelligently and effectively apply Christian principles to modern conditions and problems. There is an abiding demand for men who can bring the eternal verities of the Spirit before their congregations with power, and offer strength, cheer, courage, and comfort to those who come up weary and heavy-laden out of the work of the week.
And in return for this highest form of service any one can hope to render to his fellows, there is a mighty tide of appreciation and gratitude waiting to flow in upon the heart of the man who has been doing genuine, helpful service as a minister of Jesus Christ. The field is wide, the rewards are rich and perpetual, the opportunities are like wide-open and effectual doors, but the strong, wise, devoted laborers are all too few! You cannot anywhere on earth invest your life with more satisfaction to yourself, with a greater sense of serviceableness to your brother men, with a warmer sense of God’s own approving favor, than in the ministry of the modern Church.
In selecting your life-work, you wish to consider the whole man, to estimate possible success by the utility of the service rendered, to have a vocation to which all minor interests shall bow in glad obedience, and to make it the supreme expression of your spiritual life! Does any work on earth so meet these requirements as does the Christian ministry? In your individual case, if the call of God, the recognized needs of the world, and the sense of spiritual obligation should bear you into that vocation, you would forever thank him that among all the good things in life he had given you the best! You would gladly put away all the allurements which might defeat your spiritual effectiveness! You would say, to all beholders, by sincere and whole-hearted devotion to your calling, “I am doing a great work; I cannot come down.”