“How beautiful is youth! How bright it gleams. With its illusions, aspirations, dreams!
Book of Beginnings, Story without End,
Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!
Aladdin’s Lamp, and Fortunatus’ Purse!
That holds the treasures of the universe!
All possibilities are in its hands,
No danger daunts it and no foe withstands;
In its sublime audacity of faith,
‘Be thou removed,’ it to the mountain saith,
And with ambitious feet, secure and proud,
Ascends the ladder leaning on the cloud.”
—Longfellow: Morituri Salutamus.
How to face life, how to prepare for life, are questions that must be answered by those who believe, as Lecky put it, 10that the “map of life” must be marked out, that in the words of Emerson there is such a thing as the “conduct of life” which man is free to determine.
We are assured incessantly in these days that we must enter upon a great programme of preparedness for war,—back of which urging lies the assumption that a maximum of preparedness must be arranged in order to secure our land against the menace of aggression or invasion. If a programme of preparedness, which in the last analysis involves destruction and desolation, be impossible without the fullest planning, how much less possible is it to shape a constructive life-upbuilding programme without most careful and adequate preparedness.
11Into the mind of youth must penetrate the ideal of self-preparedness,—not of external preparation for the outward life, but of inmost preparedness for the inner life. Whether or not the preparedness programme be, as some hold, more menacing to the soul of America than foreign foe can ever become because it marks an immediate invasion of the American soul rather than a possible aggression upon American soil, it is certain that life cannot worthily be lived save after preparedness in the fullest sense of the term.
It is, in truth, easy to stir up excitement and even deeper feeling over a purely external problem such as is that of war-preparedness, preparing to do something to another whether an individual 12or a nation or a continent. The easiest way is the way of external preparedness, the militaristic way, for it involves a minimum of reasoning. But preparation for life which I ask of youth involves the largest measure of reasoning and planning and purposing. It is the hardest way rather than the easiest way, though the pursuit thereof makes ultimately for the way that is inevitably rightful and unerring.
Is it needful to urge upon young people that they shall face life with the determination to sketch for themselves a map of life as they see it, as they purpose, if so be they purpose, to make it? What would be said of a military commander who entered upon a land to him unknown without securing in advance 13the fullest possible data, without gaining, as far as it was possible so to do, an understanding of the outlines of the country he proposed to enter?
Curiously enough, it is often imagined that preparation for life is largely a matter of the higher education and exclusively associated with college and university life. This imagining may be due to the circumstance that men and women step out of so-called preparatory schools into higher institutions of learning. One sometimes wonders, in very truth, whether, instead of college preparing men for life, it were not more fitting to hold that after the college or university experience men need to be repaired if they are rightly to live and toil and serve.
14My counsel is not for men alone but for men and women, for youth and maidens alike. Let no man venture to offer two kinds of counsel, one to men and yet another to women. There is only one manner of preparedness for life, for life is life and it is not one thing for a man and yet another for a woman.
Though I have used the term “map of life,” map is hardly a happy analogy. For maps presuppose that a land is become known and familiar. And life cannot be foreknown and charted, if life it is to be, as every life ought to be, a great adventure into the unknown rather than the acceptance of a programme, a hazard of the spirit rather than a body of prescriptions and ordinances. 15We are to fare forth upon the seas of life,—without chart. But some of us attempt to sail the sea rudderless, helmless, starless. Men and women embark upon life without ever having given thought to the storms that beset, to the rocks that threaten, to the unknown perils that may lie before. And then it is wondered why many fail to make port, why the ships of life frequently founder upon the high seas. The wonder ought rather to be that so many enter triumphantly into the harbors of eternity, seeing how rarely men map out life in advance, seeing how grudging is the time spent upon preparation, seeing how seldom men diligently and consciously prepare to meet those difficulties and burdens and problems which 16adequate preparedness for life alone can fit the soul to face.
Let not life be mapped out so definitely for you, so accurately and systematically that no room will be left for the play of your own will and the determinations of your own spirit. I would almost rather have every map of life flung away than have life so mapped out as to leave youth no freedom of choice, as to fail to spur men on to face the great adventure, to be capable of daring to front whatsoever life may offer. Not very long ago, I inquired of friends, whose little lad is a pupil of one of the so-called best schools in the land, when they had applied for his admittance, and they answered, “Before he was born.” It occurred to me to inquire what dire thing 17would have happened in the event of the lad having proved upon birth to be a little lass, but the comforting assurance was at once given me that such contingency, not to say calamity, had been guarded against, in a sense, through applying for admittance to a girls’ school in the event of the lad being born a lass. It seemed to me then as it does now an admirable thing to make such comprehensive provision for a child’s education as to gain for it in advance of birth admittance into two schools, irrespective of sex.
But, without resting too heavily upon this illustration, is it not possible to prepare another for life so definitely as to deny to youth the privilege of willing, choosing, venturing, daring—even losing? 18It were almost better that a youth go without the problematic advantages of school discipline than have his school and college and university career chosen and marked out for him rigidly and inflexibly. What greater wrong can I do my child than to withhold from him the freedom of choice, than so to cabin and confine his spirit that he must needs beat his wings in the intense inane without knowing the atmosphere that magnifies freedom and liberates the soul? Guide if you will the life of youth, but beware of the danger of maiming and crippling life through so definitely and completely mapping it out as to deny the soul of youth the peril of adventure, the joy of combat, the glory of hopeless daring.
19Life must mean pioneering, not making one’s way, but breaking a way, clearing a path of life for one’s self. It is the glory of life,—and there is no glory like unto it,—to face the task of moral and intellectual pioneering. There is danger lest in our time there pass out of the life of men one of the most precious of things, that pioneering spirit that comes to the man who after he has fared forth, braved every danger, stood every peril at bay, declares in the word of the poet:
“Anybody might have heard it
But God’s whisper came to me.”
The whisper of God comes to every man or to every man it may come. The opportunity for the performance of the task of moral or spiritual pioneering is 20denied to no man. Americas of the spirit remain to be discovered within the life of every one of us. What man or woman who may read this will affirm that there has never come into his life a revelation the gleam of which enables him to see that he is free to reach a great decision, that his spirit may dare a great refusal, that his soul may utter a great affirmation? The great moment of life is that in which a man is revealed unto himself, in which his soul is laid bare, in which it comes to him with the force of a revelation,—mine is the power to will and to determine the content of my life, though if I am to will I must dare to be myself, I must reach the decision, I must will, I must be free.
21And the freedom of youth means freedom to be one’s self, to be a law unto one’s self, not to be one’s self in lawlessness. Choose ye this day whom ye will serve,—remembering that the responsibility of decision rests with you and that, in the despite of all the lives that have been lived and all the maps that have been drawn and all the plans that have been sketched and all the precedents that have been set, you must live your own life, and, if it be not your own life, it is not life at all. Cherish the counsels of loved ones but remember that neither mother nor father, uncle nor cousin nor any kinsman or kinswoman whosoever can choose whom you are to serve. You cannot serve God unless yours be the choice.
22Young men and women require to be warned against a thousand and one influences ever lurking near at hand to deter youth from the hazard of the spirit’s pioneering. Despise the counsels of the over-wise and over-mature, the sum of whose low wisdom is that a man can make no graver mistake in life than to wander from the paths which all men else have pursued. The fear of seeming unusual obsesses the soul of too many of us. Not a few men and women would rather be wrong than seem different. Difference, variance, distinctiveness are not ends in themselves, but may become and ofttimes are the means that must be used by him who is not fearful of moral distinction.
Outward differentiation is nothing, 23but inward distinction is everything,—is the counsel I ever urge upon my fellow-Jews. We are not to seem different for the sake of seeming, but we are to dare to seem to be different in order to be distinguished, in order to achieve spiritual outstandingness. When nice and refined and timid people say to you, “Remember to be like everybody else, don’t attempt anything new, don’t run the risk of seeming peculiar, don’t dream of venturing upon novel courses whether in things great or small,” remember that there is a possible invasion of the soul’s integrity that no man need endure. To the counsels of the timorous fling back the command to the brave: “Always do what you are afraid to do.”
24When men seek to affright you by their counsels of prudence, remind them of the rule of one of the knightliest of Americans, the founder of Hampton Institute, who laid upon one youth’s soul the burden: “doing what can’t be done is the glory of living.” And when men seek to degrade you to the level of their own base timidity, bid them to remember the courage and nobleness that were in the act of Higginson in leading a negro regiment touching which he said: “We all fought, for instance, with ropes around our necks, the Confederate authorities having denied to officers of colored regiments the usual privileges if taken prisoners and having required them to be treated as felons.”
Pioneering, moreover, presupposes 25unrest, discontent, just as it should. I am not fearful for the youth whose soul is in a state of unrest, the youth who has soaring ideals and knows not whether life is even worth living. If that be his problem it is enough for him to know, paraphrasing the word of the Jewish fathers, that whether or not life is worth living we must live as if it were and we must make life fuller of worth. Are you dissatisfied, are you discontented, so much the better for you. Hearing from the mother of James Russell Lowell of his general discontent with the conditions of society, Emerson wrote to her, “I hope he will never get over it.” Better the nobly discontented than the ignobly content. Did not John Stuart Mill say that pigs 26are always satisfied and men are always dissatisfied. But let your discontent and dissatisfaction be not with the world but with yourself, knowing that if it be noble it shall lift you up.
Grave consequences attend the too definite mapping out of life’s programme. Men’s passion for and faith in the profession of soldiering rest upon youth’s yearning for adventure. And if, perchance, to-day great multitudes of men are yearning to take up arms, it is not because they would destroy an enemy, but because they would obliterate the emptiness of their own lives, because they are in revolt against the absence in normal life to-day of the pioneering opportunity. It is this lack of stimulus or impulse in the direction of pioneering 27which makes for poor, mean, low substitutes in the realm of adventure. The low gang takes the place of high comradeship, the debasing fling becomes a substitute for ennobling adventure. The passion for glamour and glare, as disclosed in the craze for the motion picture, is only another expression of the thwarted sense of adventure which the soul of youth dare not be denied.
Seeing that the gang spirit is nothing more than a crude, imperfect, at worst sinful, expression of youth’s passion for togetherness, what needs to be done is to offer youth an opportunity for the expression of the deep yearning for fraternalism. Do young men imagine that they must have their fling? Is i............