SIX FO 
 
 
 (*^iiii ijmiiLiuiin'Ji: 
 
 QUA) rRANKlIN HURLBIJRT 
 
 I '.'■ 
 
 if 
 
 Um 
 
 1 :}!;,■ |i; 
 
 !!iiii;i; 
 
 
 illi::|i! 
 
 "Mli'iill!' 
 
 I:. 
 
 I,;.'' 
 
 iH'":;l^ 
 
 i ,1 ■ :' 
 
Class ___ 
 Book 
 
 Copyright ]»i°,. 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 
 
SIX FOOLS 
 
 BY 
 
 ROLLO FRANKLIN HURLBURT 
 
 THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI 
 

 Copyright, 1916, by 
 ROLLO FRANKLIN HURLBURT 
 
 CI.A427405 
 
 ^/ 
 
TO MARY MY WIFE 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 Foreword 7 
 
 I. The Young Fool 13 
 
 II. The Companion Fool 57 
 
 III. The Woman Fool 105 
 
 IV. The Rich Fool 153 
 
 V. The King Fool 197 
 
 VI. The No-God Fool 241 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 Gruff, gloomy, pessimistic, dyspeptic 
 Thomas Carlyle once described the pop- 
 ulation of England as consisting of so 
 many millions, who were mostly fools. 
 Carlyle must have been suffering from 
 one of his numerous attacks of indigestion 
 when he gave vent to that savage utter- 
 ance, or possibly one of his sleepless nights 
 had somewhat disturbed his mental equi- 
 librium. From whatever cause the ex- 
 plosion came, his percentage is confessedly 
 much too high for the number of fools 
 in England's population or in that of 
 any other civilized country. If we receive, 
 however, the generally accepted definition 
 for a fool, that he is a person deficient in 
 judgment, who acts stupidly or absurdly, 
 or pursues a course contrary to the dic- 
 tates of wisdom, then we must admit 
 that fools form a considerable number in 
 the population of every civilized land. 
 Something over a hundred times the word 
 
 7 
 
8 FOREWORD 
 
 "fool" is used in the Bible, and it is an 
 exceedingly interesting study when we come 
 to inquire into the root-meanings of the 
 word. In the different contexts, where 
 the various terms for the English word 
 "fool" are found, it means, in the original, 
 an evil person, a boaster, a self-confident 
 one, an empty fellow, a contemptible indi- 
 vidual, a villain, one who is thickheaded, 
 thoughtless, unwise, heedless, or rebellious. 
 So true are the Scriptures to universal 
 human experience that whenever we read 
 the references to fools in the Bible or 
 come to study their several individual 
 histories, their portrayal is so vivid and 
 so true to human nature that we somehow 
 feel the various writers must be describing 
 flesh-and-blood existences in this twentieth 
 century rather than men and women who 
 lived thousands of years ago. We find 
 that the modern kinds of fools are like the 
 Bible types: boasters, bragging of their 
 great exploits; wise in their own conceit, 
 but superficial and vacuous; indifferent to 
 life's greatest and best opportunities; im- 
 prudent and rash, careless and improv- 
 
FOREWORD 9 
 
 ident; wicked and base; and rebellious 
 against the laws of God and man. In the 
 chapters of this book the author has 
 nothing to do with the professional fool, 
 the jester or buffoon of the sixteenth 
 century of English history. Such was a 
 person of quick wit and ready repartee and a 
 capital story-teller, appearing quite conspic- 
 uously in Shakespeare's plays and dressed 
 in fantastic garb of most gaudy colors. 
 He wore upon his head a pointed cap 
 trimmed with small bells, that tinkled as 
 he walked. This fool was kept by persons of 
 rank for the purpose of making sport and 
 furnishing entertainment to while away the 
 often tedious hours of court routine. He 
 finds his modern counterpart in the circus 
 clown of to-day. The writer does not 
 treat of weak-minded or of idiotic people, 
 nor of insane persons, all of whom are 
 sometimes called fools. The Scriptures 
 and the larger book of human life show 
 that multitudes of people most finely en- 
 dowed have turned to the ways of folly 
 and have gone down to destruction. Some 
 of the most clever people intellectually 
 
10 FOREWORD 
 
 have, like Saul, "erred exceedingly and 
 played the fool." The sad tragedy about 
 it all is that those who, through their 
 own willfulness and stubbornness, have re- 
 fused to look at things in their true and 
 right relations, have turned deaf ears to 
 all counsels of wisdom, and have made 
 evil choices, have at last come to them- 
 selves only after the hardest and the most 
 bitter lessons learned in the rough school 
 of experience. Some see, after the years 
 with all their golden opportunities have 
 gone, how they might have succeeded only 
 after success has been finally forfeited, 
 and after their last chance to win has 
 been forever swept away. The common 
 apologetic and often smiling comment on 
 recklessness in youthful character is that 
 it is only a case of sowing wild oats. 
 People frequently refer to the sowing of 
 wild oats as lightly as they speak of measles 
 as one of the unavoidable diseases of child- 
 hood. But the young person, who indulges 
 in that sort of seed-sowing is bound to reap 
 sooner or later the harvest of the same kind 
 of worthless tares and noxious weeds of 
 
FOREWORD 11 
 
 wickedness. In many personal instances 
 after a complete moral reform, it has been 
 found that there still continue in the 
 doomed physical body the undermining 
 effects of even the few years that have been 
 spent in sin. Many a constitution that 
 has broken prematurely and many a death 
 date on the tombstone that has antedated 
 God's own good time belong in the harvest 
 of wild oats. As to the kinds of fools that 
 receive attention in this book, we discuss 
 those who, refusing to grapple with the 
 hard tasks that make manhood, compel 
 classification with the invertebrates. An- 
 other class considered are the obstinate, 
 opinionated, and self -centered, who decline 
 to accept the good counsels of those older 
 and wiser than themselves, and who are 
 rewarded according to their folly. Another 
 group treated are those who trust to the 
 attractions of external adornment rather 
 than to the sterling worth of moral qualities, 
 and who as a result come to inevitable 
 degeneracy of character. Investigation is 
 given to those who starve the soul to fatten 
 the purse, who grow rich in the abundance 
 
U FOREWORD 
 
 of the things which they possess, but be- 
 come atrophied, inactive, and inert in the 
 exercise of all the powers of the higher and 
 better nature. A study is presented of those 
 who pride themselves upon their great intel- 
 lectual ability and force of will, who claim 
 that for this reason they can give free rein 
 to appetite and passion, who maintain that 
 they will always continue to be their own 
 masters in self-control, yet who make an 
 utter wreck of life and character. Last of 
 all a view is taken of those most shallow 
 and empty of all who question or deny the 
 existence of an Intelligent First Cause. It 
 will be seen that the teaching in these pages 
 comes not only from the direct study of 
 the type of fool that is under considera- 
 tion, but also from reference to contrasting 
 characters of goodness, virtue, and ex- 
 cellence. It is sought to make the folly 
 of the fool all the more evident by 
 considering also the wisdom of the wise. 
 
I 
 
 THE YOUNG FOOL 
 
A fool always finds a greater fool to admire 
 him. — Boileau. 
 
 The fool is happy that he knows no more. — 
 Pope. 
 
 Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend! 
 More hideous than the sea-monster art thou, 
 When thou showest thyself in a child! 
 How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is 
 To have a thankless child! 
 
 — Shakespeare, 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 
 
 The ten great laws, which furnish the 
 foundation of all modern jurisprudence, 
 were written originally on two tables of 
 stone. Jewish tradition holds that upon 
 the first table were engraven the first 
 four commandments, that embody man's 
 duties to his God, and that upon the 
 second table were recorded the last six, 
 that include the duties of man to man. 
 It is uncertain whether the Decalogue was 
 thus divided as to the two tables of stone, 
 but it is evident that the Ten Command- 
 ments fall naturally into these two logical 
 divisions: duties to God and duties to man. 
 
 Why should the commandment "Honor 
 thy father and thy mother" have been 
 given the first place among the duties of 
 man to man, and thus seemingly empha- 
 sized as the most important in the second 
 division of the Decalogue.? All human 
 
 15 
 
16 SIX FOOLS 
 
 government began in the family. He who 
 created us as moral beings made us to 
 dwell together in mutual dependence. "God 
 setteth the solitary in families." The 
 germ of all authority lies in the relation 
 of parent and child; in the care that the 
 child calls forth, in the weakness of in- 
 fancy, and in the natural parental and 
 filial reverence that springs perennially 
 from the human heart. 
 
 Turning back toward the beginnings of 
 history, we behold the patriarch Abraham 
 dwelling in his tent with his children. 
 We see this household expanding into 
 tribes, yet still linked in a bond of brother- 
 hood, and still honoring and reverencing 
 the father of them all, who is their sheik, 
 priest, and head. We discern in this house- 
 hold the foundation of the Hebrew com- 
 monwealth. History repeats that same 
 early chapter in the beginnings of the 
 Roman empire, and in the tribes of the 
 Arabs of the desert to-day. 
 
 One of the wisest of English jurists, in his 
 work on ancient law, has said, "Society in 
 primitive times was not a collection of 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 17 
 
 individuals; it was an aggregation of fam- 
 ilies." The law of the household was thus 
 supreme among all early peoples. Filial 
 reverence was the foundation upon which 
 was erected the superstructure of the state. 
 
 The parental relation is the type of 
 God's relation to us, and in the filial 
 relation we find the type of our duties 
 to God. Obedience is the foundation of 
 all effective and righteous government. 
 We here notice the close relationship be- 
 tween the human and the divine, for 
 obedience is especially urged as a duty 
 in the family. What God is to us in the 
 parental sense all should be to the children 
 that bless the household. 
 
 The family relation is the source of all 
 order, the foundation of all government, 
 the inspiration of all industry, the fountain 
 of all thorough, permanent, and harmoni- 
 ous development among men. The con- 
 stitution of a state may be faulty; but 
 if it is composed of well-regulated families, 
 it will be well managed. A country's theory 
 of political government may be of the 
 best; but if its family relationships are 
 
18 SIX FOOLS 
 
 not based upon the divine plan and order, 
 it is never far removed from anarchy. 
 
 The fifth commandment is intended to 
 have a broader scope than simply the 
 promise of a long life individually to the 
 child that honors his parents. Some chil- 
 dren who honor their parents die young. 
 Yet virtuous living always tends to lon- 
 gevity; and we believe that honoring father 
 and mother will tend to lengthen the life 
 of an individual child, both naturally and 
 by the blessing of God. But the chief 
 burden of the promise is long life to a 
 nation in which children generally honor 
 their parents. This is evident from the 
 peculiar phraseology of the commandment: 
 "Honor thy father and thy mother: that 
 thy days may be long upon the land, 
 which the Lord thy God giveth thee." 
 The Israelites had been given the land 
 that had been promised them, and, like 
 them, other nations have had their lands 
 assigned to them. "God hath made of 
 one blood all nations of men to dwell on 
 all the face of the earth, and hath deter- 
 mined the bounds of their habitation." 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 19 
 
 This fair land in which we Hve hath been 
 determined as the bounds of our habita- 
 tion; and the length of time that we and 
 our descendants shall dwell here as a 
 flourishing people will depend largely upon 
 the preservation of the family as one of 
 the institutions of Christianity, upon our 
 obedience to the commandment, "Honor 
 thy father and thy mother." 
 
 We learn from the history of civilization 
 that no people who have adhered to the 
 law of the family and of the household 
 have ever degenerated or have been sub- 
 dued so as to be lost, and that no nation 
 which has loosened the holy restraints of 
 the family circle has been for any con- 
 siderable period of time vigorous and 
 growing. 
 
 China is the oldest nation on earth, 
 embracing a fourth of its population. Is 
 it not a wonderful coincidence that the 
 Chinese, with a civilization more than 
 three thousand years old, are more re- 
 markable for the obedience and reverence 
 shown to parents than for any other qual- 
 ity of character.^ Chinese children honor 
 
20 SIX FOOLS 
 
 their parents as long as they live, and 
 through the rites and ceremonies of their 
 ancestral worship they perpetuate a grate- 
 ful religious remembrance of them after 
 death. Is not this a plausible and a rea- 
 sonable solution for the problem of the 
 wonderful preservation of the Chinese civ- 
 ilization for so many centuries? The prin- 
 ciple contained in the fifth commandment 
 was one of God's great truths long before 
 it was given to the world in the Decalogue. 
 Although the Chinese have given an 
 unconscious obedience through the cen- 
 turies to a truth that had not been revealed 
 to them, yet their obedience has received 
 its due reward. 
 
 A proper regard for parental authority 
 lies at the foundation of all continuity of 
 national life, and this foundation is under- 
 mined if parental authority is defied. 
 
 This commandment presupposes in the 
 parents themselves qualities of character 
 that are in every way worthy of honor. 
 The very command "Honor" involves the 
 possession of high moral attributes in those 
 who are to be honored. Paul in his letter 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 21 
 
 to the Ephesians emphasizes this thought 
 where he says: "Children, obey your par- 
 ents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor 
 thy father and mother; which is the first 
 commandment with promise." We can 
 readily see that the principle here given 
 applies with equal force to both classes 
 involved in the statements. Parents can- 
 not educate their children according to 
 the highest standard of morality and not 
 themselves be exemplary Christians. The 
 child may give obedience in many things 
 that are for his own good to parents who 
 are not as upright as they should be, but 
 he cannot honor his father and mother 
 most highly unless they are inherently 
 worthy of the esteem and reverence man- 
 ifested. He cannot give to them the 
 highest degree of honor and reverence 
 unless his daily pathway is illumined by 
 the radiance that comes from the noble 
 manly and womanly qualities of their 
 Christian character and from the environ- 
 ment of a Christian home. No stronger 
 feeling is to be found in the heart of a 
 father and mother than the desire to be 
 
22 SIX FOOLS 
 
 worthy of the honor and love of their 
 children. Many a man who is himself the 
 victim of some odious habit will plead 
 most earnestly with his children to abstain 
 from the same evil practice, and for the 
 sake of his children he will be nerved to 
 extraordinary efforts to conquer himself. 
 Many a man has emancipated himself 
 from the degrading habits of drunkenness 
 in order to secure the respect of his chil- 
 dren and to promote their welfare. Even 
 should such a man not succeed in the 
 struggle to break the chains of his thrall- 
 dom, still it would be the duty of his 
 children to honor him as their father. 
 They should endeavor to rescue him from 
 his habits of vice, and at the same time 
 seek to withstand manfully the evil in- 
 fluence of his bad example. If this duty 
 be clearly taught in cases of real degrada- 
 tion, how impious it is for a son or daughter 
 to fail in respect for parents on account 
 of their ignorance or poverty. 
 
 Ancient story has preserved for us a 
 beautiful tradition. When, thirty centuries 
 ago, the city of Troy was sacked by the 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 23 
 
 triumphant Greeks, ^Eneas, spurning all 
 the treasures of silver and gold and other 
 valuables, that he might have taken with 
 him, lifted upon his shoulders his aged 
 father Anchises, whose wisdom and affec- 
 tion constituted for him a priceless in- 
 heritance, and bore him away to a place 
 of safety, ^neas, by this act of filial 
 love won the admiration of foes and 
 friends. He well deserves the descriptive 
 title of the "pious" ^neas which Virgil 
 gives to him, and in his unceasing devo- 
 tion to his father he is a noble example 
 of filial affection for the young men of 
 our day. 
 
 What a remarkably vivid picture of 
 filial gratitude and ingratitude is that 
 drawn by Shakespeare in his tragedy of 
 King Lear. The poor old king is deposed 
 from his throne and is driven forth with- 
 out a crown and without a kingdom. He 
 is scorned and scoffed at by his inhuman 
 daughters, Goneril and Regan, who at last 
 turn him out of doors into the darkness 
 of a stormy night. The very elements 
 seem to have conspired against him, and 
 
24 SIX FOOLS 
 
 he regards the beating of the storm as in 
 league with his unnatural daughters. But 
 his Cordelia, even after he had deeply 
 wronged her, is still most faithful to him. 
 Cordelia, who is the most beautiful cre- 
 ation of filial devotion that Shakespeare 
 has presented in his works, is ever tender, 
 true, and steadfast. 
 
 Some parents of wealth develop their 
 children in flabbiness and uselessness by 
 removing them from contact with all diffi- 
 culties. Kept busy with the playthings of 
 a continuous kindergarten, they remain 
 infants in character as long as they live. 
 Having nothing of the arduous toil that 
 makes strength of purpose, naught of the 
 intense struggle that makes the mental 
 and moral fiber of giants, and none of 
 those mighty barriers to overcome that 
 make heroes in life's conflict, they develop 
 into dudes instead of men. 
 
 A rich boy born in a mansion, wdth a 
 multimillionaire father, is cared for by a 
 French nurse. He is rocked to sleep upon 
 pillows of eider down and is dandled in 
 the lap of luxury. He is fitted for college 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 25 
 
 by a private tutor, and never learns in 
 early life what it is to measure his own 
 mental and physical strength with other 
 boys of the same age. He is then sent 
 to some one of the big Eastern universities 
 and is bolstered up by paid tutors, who 
 for so much an hour cram him for his 
 periodical examinations all through his col- 
 lege course of study. He then travels 
 abroad for a while, and comes back home 
 labeled as ''finished." He has been learn- 
 ing up to this time as his chief occupation 
 in life how to kill time most agreeably to 
 himself. What do you have as a result 
 of all this petting and propping up.'^ You 
 have a great big overgrown baby — that 
 is all. Suppose this rich young man's 
 father fails suddenly, loses all his money, 
 and his precious dude of a son is com- 
 pelled to shift for himself. Then put him 
 by the side of another young man of the 
 same age, who has learned his costly les- 
 sons in the hard school of adversity, and 
 he will be left so far in the rear that he 
 will be pronounced as distanced in almost 
 the first mile of the race, 
 
26 SIX FOOLS 
 
 Thomas Carlyle, in his Sartor Resartus, 
 devotes an entire chapter to what he calls 
 "The Dandiacal Man." The EngUsh dandy 
 is what is known among us as the Amer- 
 ican dude. Mr. Carlyle settled down to 
 a scientific study of this character, and 
 this is his definition: "A dandy is a clothes- 
 wearing man, a man whose trade, office, 
 and existence consist in the wearing of 
 clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, 
 purse, and person is heroically consecrated 
 to this one object, the wearing of clothes 
 wisely and well: so that as others dress 
 to live, he lives to dress." 
 
 The dude never seems to have learned 
 that success in life is something more than 
 playing substitute for the wooden dummy 
 used by merchants on which to display 
 their latest suits. The contents of the 
 head are more important than the cost of 
 the hat. Truth is of more consequence 
 than the style of trousers. Quality of 
 character is better than "quality clothes." 
 A man's salvation does not depend upon 
 the make of his shoes. There is a wide 
 remove between the young man, of com- 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 27 
 
 mendable good taste, who dresses neatly 
 and attractively, without making dress the 
 chief aim of life, and the young man 
 whose decalogue, creed, and confession of 
 faith all relate to the wearing of clothes. 
 People of good common sense are quick 
 to discern the difference between the man 
 who lives to dress and the man who dresses 
 to live. The dude is so occupied with 
 the outer husk of things that he gives no 
 thought to the inner substance. He has 
 a contempt for all kinds of hard work, and 
 looks down With disdain upon all those 
 who are obliged to earn their living by 
 the sweat of their brow and the labor of 
 their hands. 
 
 Shall we call the dude a man.^^ We may 
 be compelled to acknowledge that he be- 
 longs to the human species. But as we 
 have looked upon him and his class we 
 have thought with Shakespeare's Hamlet: 
 
 Some of Nature's journeymen had made men, 
 
 and not made them well, 
 They imitated humanity so abominably. 
 
 The leisure class is rapidly increasing in 
 
28 SIX FOOLS 
 
 our land. We sometimes feel compelled to 
 ask, "Are we in the next generation to have 
 a race of dudes rather than a race of men?" 
 Oliver Goldsmith never uttered a greater 
 truth than when he said, 
 
 111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, 
 Where wealth accumulates and men decay. 
 
 God's method of planning and working 
 for us should be our method of planning 
 and working for our children. A far older 
 law than any in Adam Smith's Wealth of 
 Nations makes it mandatory upon every 
 man, whose brawn or brain can add any- 
 thing whatever to productive industry, to 
 contribute to the values of the world 
 according to his ability. It is every man's 
 duty to do this independently of the ques- 
 tion whether his circumstances compel him 
 to do so or not. Having parents, who 
 are able and foolishly willing to supply 
 fully all of a young man's wants does 
 not excuse him from the obligation of 
 earning his own li^dng. Willingness to be 
 thus supported by his parents beyond the 
 age when he is able to care for himself 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 29 
 
 will eliminate the manliness and obliterate 
 the self-respect from the soul of any young 
 man who degrades himself by becoming an 
 inert and passive recipient. Parents can- 
 not make any greater mistake than to 
 support a son in trifling indolence. That 
 father and mother who are held back from 
 compelling a son to go out in the world 
 and make his own living are dominated 
 by a weak and false sentiment. Neither 
 legacy nor inheritance brings the higher 
 values to the soul's possessions; they must 
 be paid for in the coin of self-denial and 
 self-sacrifice. The child of the wisest man 
 cannot receive his knowledge from his 
 father as a heritage; he must toil to acquire 
 his alphabet, spelling, reading, and multi- 
 plication table by the side of the offspring 
 of the most ignorant. His mind must be 
 gradually trained to larger tasks just as 
 the father's intellect has been slowly dis- 
 ciplined to meet successfully, and to solve, 
 great problems. His growth into the in- 
 tellectual power of the parent is con- 
 ditioned upon a like intensity of mental 
 application. The most eminent saints can- 
 
80 SIX FOOLS 
 
 not give to their children the graces that 
 they have acquired only by the stress of 
 toil and conflict. The child to gain them 
 must pass over the same rough road of 
 arduous labor and strenuous struggle. Ja- 
 cob's character reached its richest maturity 
 only after he had gone through the darkest 
 agonies of trouble and heart-breaking sor- 
 row. Joseph's wise statesmanship and 
 lofty benevolence came as the direct fruit 
 of the bitter persecution of his own brothers 
 and his confinement in an Egyptian dun- 
 geon. The Pauline character is the fruit 
 of the successful struggle with a Pauline 
 environment. In character-building God 
 always stands ready to give brass for 
 iron, silver for brass, and gold for silver. 
 When God wanted a man to lead the 
 chosen people out of their bondage, he 
 might have bestowed at once upon the 
 one whom he selected every gift and 
 qualification that were needed for the 
 large task. But instead he chose the man 
 and then put him through eighty years of 
 training and discipline before he placed 
 upon his shoulders the responsibility of 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 81 
 
 the great work. Moses must esteem the 
 reproach of Christ as greater riches than 
 the treasures of Egypt. He must be will- 
 ing to suffer affliction with the people of 
 God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of 
 sin for a season. Giving up the ancestral 
 palace of the Pharaohs for a home in the 
 desert wastes, and leaving the association 
 of princes and kings, he must keep com- 
 pany with sheep in the wilds of Arabia. 
 But under the divine alchemy his silver 
 was transformed into gold. How small and 
 worthless were the things that Moses re- 
 linquished when compared with the infinite 
 values that he received in return! He 
 gave up dependence upon goats and sheep 
 and camels for the riches of an abiding 
 faith in the living God. He surrendered 
 all his rights as an adopted son of the 
 Pharaohs, that his name might become 
 embalmed in history for all time. He 
 yielded up the brief companionship of 
 earthly kings that he might receive the 
 tables of stone from the Omnipotent God 
 and share with Christ in the glories of the 
 Mount of Transfiguration. He forsook the 
 
32 SIX FOOLS 
 
 transient attractions that were within his 
 grasp that he might have the everlasting 
 company of the King of kings. He re- 
 nounced the heirship to the throne of 
 Egypt that he might become the leader 
 and deliverer of God's chosen people, the 
 originator of a new era of government, 
 the source through whom there should 
 come to the world its best and wisest 
 laws, and the author of some of the most 
 illustrious books in all literature. He 
 abandoned all his claims to a petty king- 
 dom that he might become preeminent 
 among the great statesmen of all time. 
 Difficulties are the invitations that come to 
 us to amount to something. If it were in 
 accordance with the divine purpose to de- 
 velop us in limpness and feebleness, then 
 these obstructions would all be taken away 
 from us. Then there would be no obstacles 
 to surmount, no enemies to fight, no 
 troubles or trials to distress in life. But 
 because manhood and character are to be 
 won we are to face these hindrances that 
 lie before us; we are to take hold of them 
 and conquer them. 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 33 
 
 The Almighty Father wants all the 
 power that we have; so he is interesting 
 himself in the development of all the 
 mental and moral strength that we possess. 
 All the rugged mountains that we have to 
 climb, all the surging rivers that we are 
 called upon to cross, all the foes without 
 and the foes within that we are called 
 upon to face everywhere, mean develop- 
 ment. They are all in the divine plan for 
 the perfecting of human character. 
 
 Why all the heartache, why all the ardu- 
 ous toil? Why was not every truth made 
 self-evident to begin with? Why has the 
 human race been pushed on through all 
 its long and agonizing struggle for the 
 truth through all these thousands of years? 
 Why were not this truth, that truth, and 
 the other truth all written out in plain 
 and easy script, and then put here and 
 there in little boxes and all plainly labeled, 
 so that all we would be obliged to do 
 would be to go to the proper box and find 
 the truth waiting for us, and get it in all 
 its simplicity, without any effort upon our 
 part? This is Lessing's answer: "Did the 
 
34 SIX FOOLS 
 
 Almighty, holding in his right hand Truth, 
 and in his left Search after Truth, deign 
 to proffer me but one, I should request 
 Search after Truth." 
 
 God saw the possibilities of development 
 in the human race, and so, instead of 
 leaving us in our intellectual and moral 
 babyhood, he planned for our growth into 
 the largest moral and intellectual power. 
 We are given this opportunity to search 
 after the truth, and to struggle for it, in 
 order that we may grow up in all the 
 graces of a strong and stalwart character. 
 We are made strong for holding the truth, 
 after we get it, by climbing after it and 
 struggling to reach it. All those who 
 shrink from the weariness that goes with 
 the intense effort, who do not agonize for 
 the possession of the truth, never will be 
 able to hold it after they get it. The 
 truth is not true enough to them to stay 
 with them, and they themselves are not 
 true enough to the truth lovingly and 
 desperately to attach their lives to it. 
 
 We find, in the lazy view of life that 
 prevails in some places, that some people 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 35 
 
 at times get to wondering why man, when 
 he first appeared upon this earth, did not 
 find already here steamboats upon the 
 lakes and the rivers and in our ocean har- 
 bors. Why did he not find railroads and 
 telegraph and telephone lines, and the great 
 engines of fire and steam, ready to carry 
 his enterprises to the ends of the earth? 
 They wonder why there should have been 
 so many long years of waiting for the 
 printing press, why there should have been 
 such a vast amount of weary blundering 
 as that which preceded the invention of 
 the telephone and the phonograph. Why 
 could not Adam have found the telephone 
 ready for his use in the Garden of Eden? 
 Man's great work is not the manufacture 
 of steamboats, of railroads, of telegraph and 
 telephone lines, of printing presses and of 
 phonographs. Man's great work is the 
 development of human character; and he 
 has been led to make steamboats and 
 railroads, to build telegraph and telephone 
 lines, to invent printing presses and phono- 
 graphs and aeroplanes, not only that he 
 may develop commerce and civilization. 
 
36 SIX FOOLS 
 
 but above all that he may develop him- 
 self. Man has been brought up along 
 these lines of material development in 
 order that he may be led out into the 
 larger places along the lines of spiritual 
 development. A strong and matured char- 
 acter comes from the development of these 
 powers within us through the difficulties 
 that we find around us. Life is a succession 
 of battles, a continuous warfare. We have 
 to fight with contending forces from the 
 cradle to the grave. The questions are 
 often asked: Why was life made so hard.^ 
 Why should men be required to toil so 
 terribly.^ Why should we be called upon 
 continually to confront such mighty oppos- 
 ing forces.^ It is this constant contest 
 that is the very making of man, the very 
 making of society. Without this ceaseless 
 conflict we would become weak, puny, and 
 powerless instead of strong, noble, and 
 heroic. We would become the merest 
 pygmies without the possibility of ever 
 maturing into mental and moral giants. 
 All the masterly inventions that now bless 
 the world are but the fruits of this mighty 
 
 I 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 37 
 
 struggle, the weapons that men have con- 
 trived to help them in fighting the great 
 battle of life. Much of our best literature 
 is but the outcome of efforts made in this 
 unending combat with the forces that op- 
 pose. Many of our noblest poems are but 
 the passionate expressions of truth that 
 have been wrung from the human heart 
 in the stress, the struggle, the agony of 
 life's battles. Many of those who have 
 done so much to teach and to inspire the 
 world by their famous works, if they had 
 been nursed in the lap of luxury, would 
 have lived lives of inglorious ease and 
 fruitless indolence. Deprive mankind to- 
 day of all those products in inventions and 
 in arts, in science, in philosophy, and in 
 literature which we owe to that stern 
 necessity which has compelled men to exer- 
 cise their physical and intellectual powers 
 to the utmost limit of endurance, and the 
 world would be despoiled of its richest 
 treasures. 
 
 That masterpiece in English literature 
 Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country 
 Churchyard" contains a thought with 
 
38 SIX FOOLS 
 
 which I do not agree, where the author 
 speaks of "The short and simple annals 
 of the poor." Much rather should he 
 speak of the long and splendid annals of 
 the poor. The families of the poor have 
 opened their doors to our thought, and 
 have given to art, to poetry, and to litera- 
 ture, to discovery, to travel, to science, 
 and to all reform the best and the noblest 
 men and women that the world has ever 
 known. Genius has often rocked her chil- 
 dren in cradles of poverty, and the eye 
 of the future has always been able to find 
 the true leaders of mankind under thatched 
 roofs and on beds of straw. 
 
 Whatever may have been his early cir- 
 cumstances, Paul, the Christian and the 
 great apostle to the Gentiles, was poor 
 and a tentmaker. Shakespeare was poor, 
 and if he had been rich, he doubtless never 
 would have given to the world his immortal 
 plays. Ben Jonson worked with a trowel 
 in his hand and a book in his pocket. 
 Sir William Herschel, the eminent astron- 
 omer; John Bunyan, the immortal dreamer; 
 and Richard Cobden, the great English 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 39 
 
 statesman, were poor. Martin Luther, 
 Patrick Henry, Henry Clay, Daniel Web- 
 ster, Horace Greeley, Charlotte Cushman, 
 Rosa Bonheur, Maria Mitchell, and Louisa 
 M. Alcott all sprang from the ranks of 
 the poor. Make out a list of the most 
 prominent business men, the most noted 
 lawyers, the most distinguished physicians, 
 the most eminent preachers, the most con- 
 spicuous statesmen in our land to-day, and 
 then strike off from that list all those who 
 began life as poor boys, obliged to make 
 their own way, and they would outnumber 
 the born aristocrats ten to one. 
 
 Poverty is only another name for oppor- 
 tunity, and it means to the person who 
 has in him the stuff out of which men are 
 made the opportunity to pluck victory out 
 of defeat; the chance, in the face of ob- 
 scurity or ill health, or amid the cold 
 environment of a chilling indifference, to 
 fight one's way to the front and to win. 
 Any young man who is discouraged be- 
 cause of his poverty should remember that 
 he belongs to that long and illustrious 
 lineage of the poor whose glorious his- 
 
40 SIX FOOLS 
 
 tory illumines all the centuries that are 
 past. 
 
 Assuming that one's parents are Chris- 
 tian at heart, in purpose, and in their 
 vision of life, it is evident that obedience 
 to the fifth commandment must lie at the 
 basis of the truest and the most abiding 
 success. The one who disobeys this com- 
 mandment not only dishonors the father 
 who has provided for him, and the mother 
 who has so tenderly cared for him — which 
 is certainly a black enough sin in itself — 
 but he walks directly across one of the 
 great laws of God. Yet there are young 
 lads who actually think that it is a manly 
 thing to disobey their parents, who are 
 "not going to be bossed about by the 
 governor" nor **held in leading strings by 
 the old lady," to use the contemptible 
 language so frequently applied to parents 
 by the young American of to-day. They 
 may speak most contemptuously of their 
 fathers as "the old fool," but the world's 
 verdict is that they themselves are the 
 real fools. There are numbers of young 
 men who talked just that way who have 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 41 
 
 been shut up in a room a good deal smaller 
 than the one in which their parents wished 
 them to stay before they went so very 
 far in life, a room that was lighted only 
 by one little window in its iron door, and 
 no latchkey with which to go in and out 
 at their own free will. Staying out against 
 the will of one's parents often leads to 
 staying in altogether, and that behind bolts 
 and bars. 
 
 The lack of wholesome restriction in the 
 home life points the way inevitably to 
 future possible disobedience to the laws 
 of the state. The boy who grows up in 
 the household having his own way in 
 everything, a law unto himself, with all 
 the money that he wants to spend, often 
 matures into the lawless character, with 
 whom the state must have a reckoning 
 after a while. Prison restraint is therefore 
 often necessary for those who in their 
 young life have been brought up without 
 home restraint. Many a father, while 
 growing rich in acquiring property, has be- 
 come a pauper in the deterioration of the 
 character values of his children. He has 
 
42 SIX FOOLS 
 
 started in business completely given over to 
 the one idea of money-making. This one 
 dominating ideal has through the years 
 absorbed all his time and energy. He has 
 found it much easier to buy off his son 
 with free indulgence and plenty of money 
 than to sacrifice upon him any of his val- 
 uable time. So, while he has built up his 
 great, increasing, and successful business, 
 his son has become a fool. 
 
 A man who worships mammon himself 
 cannot teach his boy how to reverence 
 and to worship God. If a man's business 
 ethics is full of sharp practice, deceit, and 
 misrepresentation, he can never expect to 
 be able to teach his offspring the New 
 Testament standard of ethics. No father 
 can teach his child integrity, love, and 
 truth when he shows out dishonesty, hate, 
 and falsehood in his own life. Antichrist 
 in the living example of the father often 
 means a life against Christ in the conduct 
 of the son. A father may teach his son 
 the Commandments and the Sermon on 
 the Mount, and hear him recite them 
 glibly by heart; but it is his own daily 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 43 
 
 life that teaches the eternal verities of 
 righteousness or bears witness against them. 
 The Scriptures place the larger respon- 
 sibility upon the father as the head of the 
 family, in the proper rearing and training 
 of the children. God is represented as 
 speaking of Abraham: "I know Abraham, 
 that he will command his children and his 
 household after him; and they shall keep 
 the way of the Lord, to do justice and 
 judgment." When Joshua, after the con- 
 quest of the promised land, had set up the 
 monuments in Gilgal, he said: "When j^our 
 children ask their fathers in time to come, 
 saying. What mean ye by these stones? 
 Then shall ye answer them." The duty of 
 instructing the children in the history of 
 their people was not delegated to the 
 mothers, to the schoolmasters, nor to the 
 priests, but it was placed upon the fathers 
 in Israel. The Pauline admonition holds 
 the father as responsible by precept and 
 example for the rightful bringing up of 
 the children: "Fathers, provoke not your 
 children to wrath: but bring them up in 
 the nurture and admonition of the Lord." 
 
44 SIX FOOLS 
 
 We are living in times when this truth 
 needs greater emphasis than has ever been 
 given to it before. Numerous fathers in 
 this generation are shirking their duty in 
 the control, the training, and education 
 of their children. In multiplied instances 
 the mother is doing all the work which 
 pertains to the moral culture of the chil- 
 dren in the home. It is frequently the 
 case that the father feels that if he is 
 known as "a good provider," if he con- 
 tributes a liberal sum of money for the 
 support of the children, and pays the 
 household bills promptly when they come 
 in, he has done all that could be ex- 
 pected. Meeting the obligations incident 
 to the home expense account is the small- 
 est part of a father's duty. 
 
 Multitudes of children who have been 
 brought up in commodious and luxurious 
 homes but without a father's wise and 
 thoughtful supervision, and who as a re- 
 sult have made moral failures when they 
 have come to years of maturity, would 
 have had an infinitely better chance for 
 happy and successful careers if they had 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 45 
 
 grown up in poverty, but with a father's 
 strong and watchful care. Upon every 
 side may be seen the wrecks of famihes 
 that have been brought on through having 
 only a nominal father; and it is a ruin 
 that can be traced directly to the lack of 
 a thoughtful, guiding, and directing father- 
 hood. 
 
 In the actual tragedies of everyday life 
 we often read the same sad story. Here 
 is the picture that is frequently seen in 
 real life: We behold a happy family, with 
 father, mother, and three little children. 
 The eldest of the children is a boy, bright, 
 intelligent, and quick to learn, the pride 
 of his parents' hearts. All their hopes are 
 centered in him. Every wish of his boy- 
 hood is gratified. He grows up having his 
 own way, pampered, petted, and spoiled. 
 The first stepping-stone that leads the way 
 to that boy's ruin is the over-indulgence 
 of his parents. Receiving too large an 
 allowance, it soon becomes evident to all 
 that he has altogether too much spending 
 money for his own good. He begins to 
 show unmistakable signs of recklessness be- 
 
46 SIX FOOLS 
 
 fore he is twenty. Out late at night, 
 keeping bad company, extravagant, pro- 
 fane, he drinks and oftentimes to excess. 
 He frequents the gambHng hell, and the 
 house of her whose "feet go down to death, 
 whose steps take hold on hell." Father 
 expostulates again and again, but is roughly 
 answered. Mother weeps and sisters plead, 
 but it is all in vain. The riotous excesses 
 of that young man become in time matter 
 of public conversation. 
 
 It is the same old story of the wages 
 of sin, of the downward road that leads 
 to destruction. Luxury has bred dissipa- 
 tion, and at last that loved boy goes out 
 from that home, under the awful domina- 
 tion of sinful appetites and debasing pas- 
 sions. He commits a crime for which he 
 is tried and convicted, and he serves his 
 sentence in the State's prison. Some day 
 there flashes over the wires to that home 
 the message informing them that their only 
 son was shot and instantly killed in a 
 saloon in a drunken brawl. 
 
 One of my college mates was the son 
 of one of the most distinguished and most 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 47 
 
 eloquent preachers that ever stood in the 
 Unitarian pulpits of this country, the pastor 
 for a number of years of the most prom- 
 inent churches of that denomination in 
 Chicago, Boston, and New York. The 
 young fellow's academic knowledge was of 
 the sort that had come from absorption 
 rather than from studious application. He 
 had a bright mind, could acquire easily, 
 and many a time his quick wit helped him 
 out with an unprepared lesson. He was 
 very companionable, and we were all soon 
 calling him by his first name. How well 
 do I remember Levin! He was polite, 
 ingratiating in his ways, and his genuine 
 kindness of heart made him at once a 
 general favorite among the students of that 
 institution. But when he came to us he 
 was already under the bondage of an 
 appetite that enslaved him. He often 
 drank to intoxication, and every now and 
 then he would go to a neighboring town 
 and enter upon a spree that would last two 
 or three days. The faculty bore with him 
 as long as they could for his father's sake. 
 But at last forbearance ceasing to be a 
 
48 SIX FOOLS 
 
 virtue, he was expelled from the institu- 
 tion. The president of the college informed 
 the father of the expulsion of his son, 
 with the full reasons for the action. He 
 received in return a draft for the full 
 payment of all his son's bills, and was 
 requested to settle all of them personally, 
 not giving any of the money to the young 
 man himself. He was instructed to pur- 
 chase for his son his railway ticket clear 
 through to Boston, and to give him only 
 money enough in addition to pay for his 
 meals on the way. That father closed his 
 letter with these pathetic words: 'T have 
 no fault to find with the action of the 
 faculty, for it is a just one. My son had 
 his own way too much when he was young, 
 and was given too large an allowance. I 
 sent him to you in the vain hope that 
 with different surroundings and new asso- 
 ciations he might be induced to lead a 
 new life. But I fear that he is wrecked 
 and ruined beyond all recovery. God only 
 knows how much I have already suffered 
 for my wayward boy, and what I may be 
 called upon to suffer in the future." Five 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 49 
 
 years after that I one day picked up a 
 Chicago daily paper and read in the Asso- 
 ciated Press dispatches from Saint Louis 
 that the night before Levin had been shot 
 and instantly killed in a drunken brawl in 
 a Broadway saloon. It was not long after 
 that that his father resigned his pulpit, 
 retired from the ministry, and after a short 
 time spent in retirement he died. It has 
 ever since seemed to me, who had this 
 chapter from the inside history of that 
 brilliant man, that he died of a broken 
 heart. 
 
 Young men who start upon careers of 
 vice to-day very often begin with a de- 
 sire to throw off the home restraints and 
 to cut loose from what they term the old- 
 fogy notions of Christian parents; but in 
 the after years there comes to them the 
 vision of themselves and the mother that 
 stood there in the open door to say good-by 
 as they went forth to make their own way 
 in the world. That mother may have been 
 one of the old-fashioned kind, who never 
 had been one hundred miles away from 
 home, who never had seen any large city. 
 
50 SIX FOOLS 
 
 who never had had any special social or 
 educational advantages. That mother may 
 have been one of the old-fashioned class, 
 whose range of reading was not wide, only 
 her Bible, the little town weekly newspaper, 
 and one religious paper, who knew nothing 
 about the most recent famous novel and 
 little concerning the actions of that cir- 
 cumlocution establishment down in Wash- 
 ington, our national Congress, with its 
 ever-present problem, "How not to do it," 
 and yet at the same time to keep the 
 people thinking that "something's doing" 
 at the seat of government. There arises 
 in after years the vision of leaving that 
 home and that mother, and the man may 
 then remember how in his youthful conceit 
 he really pitied that mother, in the narrow- 
 ness of her vision, in the limited range of 
 her opportunities, as he said to himself: 
 "Now I am going to have my own way. 
 Father and mother and home have held 
 me in long enough. What is really mine 
 I am going to have from now on, and I am 
 not going to be chained down any longer 
 by home restraints and by old-fogy no- 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 51 
 
 tions." But there is the mighty current 
 of the strong influence of moral power, 
 of sturdy integrity, and of noblest Chris- 
 tian character that flows forth from that 
 home, which in the after years is always 
 appraised at its true value. 
 
 At one of the greatest art exhibits ever 
 held in this country I once saw a painting 
 that riveted my attention. Now engrav- 
 ings of this masterpiece are often seen, 
 but then the picture was new. I refer to 
 Hovenden's "Breaking the Home Ties." 
 No other work of art in all that large and 
 splendid collection attracted so many peo- 
 ple and held them so long as did this 
 wonderful home scene. No one who ever 
 saw this picture could ever forget it. It 
 is simply the picture of a boy leaving 
 home. You see the living room of a hum- 
 ble home, scantily furnished, the dress of 
 the inmates being of the plainest kind. 
 There stands a mother, with her hands 
 upon the shoulders of her boy, looking 
 into his face as only a mother can look, 
 and giving him parting words of counsel, 
 as he is leaving home and breaking the 
 
52 SIX FOOLS 
 
 ties that have so long held the family 
 together. The boy is holding his old felt 
 hat in his hand, that is hanging down by 
 his side. His clothes are outgrown, ill- 
 fitting, and faded. A sister of some twelve 
 years of age is leaning against the door- 
 post and looking sadly at the departing 
 brother. Sitting at the breakfast table, 
 from which the dishes have not yet been 
 cleared away, is the old, white-haired 
 grandmother, with such a gentle, tender, 
 wistful look in her dear, sweet face. An 
 older sister, apparently about eighteen years 
 of age, is sitting in the rear part of the 
 room with downcast eyes and sorrowful 
 face, her hand resting upon the head of 
 an old shepherd dog beside her, looking 
 as if he too shared in the general sadness 
 of the occasion. The stage driver is 
 standing outside the door, with whip in 
 hand, waiting for the passenger. The 
 father has seized the old carpet satchel, in 
 which the boy's worldly effects are care- 
 fully packed, and is going out, because 
 his heart is too full to remain in the room. 
 You glance over the picture and you 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 53 
 
 start to go on, but you stop to take an- 
 other look, as if chained to the spot by the 
 spell of some strong magic. You look at 
 the boy with his honest face, and you 
 say to yourself, ''What a noble looking 
 boy!" You gaze upon the mother with 
 her yearning look of love, and you say, 
 "What volumes are in that mother's face!" 
 Seldom, if ever, have you seen such ex- 
 pressiveness pictured upon the canvas as 
 you see in that mother's face. It touches 
 a chord that vibrates in every soul. Every- 
 body seems to say, "Surely I know that 
 face"; and then it flashes upon the mind: 
 "That is my mother." If you had stood 
 there for a long time, as I did within that 
 corridor in which that painting hung where 
 I first saw it, you would have seen strong 
 men turn away again and again and bite 
 their lips, endeavoring to gain control of 
 their emotions, or hiding the tears, that 
 were starting from their eyes. All around 
 you people were saying: "Ah! how that 
 picture carries me back to the years gone 
 by! That is my home and that is my 
 mother." You look again at that mother's 
 
54 SIX FOOLS 
 
 face, and all the past, present, and future 
 seem to concentrate there. All the care 
 and anxiety of a mother's heart seem to 
 have leaped into her face at this supreme 
 moment in one grand effort to impress 
 that boy with the greatness of a mother's 
 love. You see the agonies that she has 
 suffered; the sleepless nights of weary 
 watching by the bedside of her sick loved 
 ones, the unrequited years of toil. You 
 also see a touch of motherly pride in a 
 noble boy; surely his strong and manly 
 face would make any mother justly proud. 
 But above all you see an indescribable 
 suspense depicted in her countenance. Her 
 eyes seem to be looking into the future; 
 and that entire panorama which she sees 
 floats before you as you study that face. 
 Hell from beneath is moved to meet that 
 boy. Demons are dispatched to plot his 
 destruction. Nets are already spread for 
 his ruin in the gilded palaces of sin. All 
 this seems to be written in that mother's 
 face. 
 
 When you think of the constant mighty 
 impulse toward righteousness which the 
 
THE YOUNG FOOL 55 
 
 love of such a mother will always be to 
 that boy, you conclude that he will never 
 be the *'fool that despiseth his father's 
 instruction," that he will be the ''wise 
 son that maketh a glad father" and never 
 "the foolish son that is the heaviness of 
 his mother." You thank God for the power 
 that a Christian mother has of putting 
 something into a boy that makes his con- 
 science cry out most loudly against it 
 when for the first time he stands with 
 companions in front of some saloon, some 
 gambling den, or some other place of evil 
 resort, debating the question as to whether 
 he will go in with them or not, and de- 
 cides that he will not. The love of a 
 Christian mother is the greatest safeguard 
 of youthful character. 
 
II 
 
 THE COMPANION FOOL 
 
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. — Pope. 
 
 A man's mind is known by the company it keeps. 
 — Lowell. 
 
 It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant 
 courage is caught as men take diseases, one of 
 another; therefore let men take heed of their com- 
 pany. — Shakespeare, 
 
II 
 
 THE COMPANION FOOL 
 
 Many a noble scriptural character stands 
 out in the clear perspective of Bible biog- 
 raphy as an illustrious and inspiring exam- 
 ple. But the life of Rehoboam is given as 
 a warning. Ancestry had done much for 
 Rehoboam. The grandson of David and 
 the son of Solomon, he was the latter's 
 successor to the throne. That ''blood will 
 always tell" is a fallacious adage, for the 
 nobodies often come from the somebodies, 
 and the somebodies frequently spring from 
 the nobodies. 
 
 There is a specious philosophy that is 
 appearing to-day in much of our current 
 literature, in magazines as well as in 
 books, that greatly magnifies heredity and 
 environment as the makers and molders 
 of character, and that minifies or else 
 entirely nullifies the influence of the will 
 and divine grace. Here is a brief state- 
 
 59 
 
60 SIX FOOLS 
 
 ment of its principal propositions: Two 
 great factors make the sum of human Hfe, 
 heredity and environment, and by these 
 the character of individuals, or of genera- 
 tions, is molded. Man is the resultant 
 of his environment and heredity. If they 
 impel him in the same direction, he will 
 get far; but if they push in opposite direc- 
 tions, he may not get anywhere. Man is 
 as completely the result of his own nature, 
 and impelled to do what he does, as the 
 needle to point to the north, or the puppet 
 to move according as the string is pulled. 
 A man must accept his heredity as an 
 unalterable fact. He can do nothing to 
 improve or to modify it. 
 
 This is the creed of the fatalist. Its 
 fallacy is seen in the omission of a third 
 factor which also enters into the sum of 
 human life, and which is far greater than 
 the other two — the will. Heredity, environ- 
 ment, will — these are the trium^drate that 
 determine human destiny. Man possesses 
 a self -determining power, which makes him 
 not the creature but the creator of cir- 
 cumstances and which enables him to turn 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 61 
 
 obstacles into stepping-stones that lead to 
 final victory. This is the only theory that 
 can give to us a true interpretation of life; 
 it alone can account for the facts that 
 are revealed in the book of human expe- 
 rience; it alone can explain the remarkable 
 development of multitudes of people, who 
 did not have the help of royal heritage or 
 of inspiring environment, but whose glo- 
 rious achievements have won the admira- 
 tion of the world. 
 
 Myriads of noble characters have come 
 up from most lowly conditions and have 
 stood forth in all their strength and beauty, 
 like the pure, white petals of the pond 
 lily that has sprung from the mud and 
 mire beneath. Multitudes of God's noblest 
 heroes have through force of will con- 
 quered both heredity and environment and 
 have illumined and glorified all the cen- 
 turies with the light of their splendid 
 victories. 
 
 The Athenians erected a statue to ^sop, 
 who was born a slave, that the Grecians 
 might know that the way to honor is open 
 to all. An American general, who grad- 
 
62 SIX FOOLS 
 
 uated at West Point the first in his class 
 and arose to high rank on the basis of 
 pure merit, said: "I inherited nothing from 
 my father in Vermont but a pair of second- 
 hand trousers, an old worn-out seal skin 
 cap, and a tendency to rheumatism." A 
 poor little thirteen-year-old newsboy, run- 
 ning into Detroit over the Grand Trunk 
 railroad, lost his job through breaking a 
 bottle of sulphuric acid and filling one of 
 the cars with an unearthly odor, while 
 experimenting with chemicals. He got not 
 only trounced but bounced by the con- 
 ductor, who declared that he wouldn't have 
 any boy on his train who was fooling with 
 chemicals all the time. 
 
 Heredity and environment might have 
 said to him: "You've lost your job. What's 
 the use of your trying to amount to any- 
 thing or to be anybody.^ You might as 
 well give up." But the masterful will said: 
 "I'll make it win in life yet." That dis- 
 charged newsboy became the wizard of 
 Menlo Park, Thomas A. Edison. He was 
 not the creature but the creator of circum- 
 stances, the architect of his own character. 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 63 
 
 A mighty purpose, that comes from a 
 commanding will, gathers in power from 
 the forces that oppose. It feeds upon 
 defeat. It grows under misfortune. It 
 matures under the fiercest tropical heat of 
 repeated disaster. Adversity only serves to 
 redouble diligence. Opposition only whets 
 the more keenly the edge of the sword 
 of resolution. Mountains dwindle into 
 molehills before the man who is dominated 
 by a worthy and a noble purpose. Ob- 
 stacles that seemed unconquerable are not 
 only overcome, but they are converted 
 into helps toward success by the over- 
 whelming will. Where the Mississippi be- 
 gins a little brook flowing from the Itasca 
 lake, or where the Missouri rises in the 
 Rocky Mountain range, their streams are 
 so small, that they could be pumped dry 
 in a few short hours. But behold them in 
 their mighty currents at Saint Louis and 
 at New Orleans, and you will see there 
 volumes of water that are irresistible and 
 inexhaustible. So it is that an all-dominat- 
 ing purpose that comes from a masterful 
 will gathers in strength and volume with 
 
64 SIX FOOLS 
 
 every passing day. It makes everything 
 subservient to the one great end. It gathers 
 from all sources in life until its current 
 is irresistible and its volume is inexhaustible. 
 One might as well try to dam up the 
 Amazon with bulrushes, or to stop the 
 current of the Saint Lawrence with bundles 
 of baled hay, as to try to turn aside the 
 man whose life is eternally linked to a 
 mighty purpose. 
 
 Fatalism holds that pedigree has every- 
 thing to do with our lives. The goodness 
 that we manifest is only the outcropping 
 of inherited goodness; the evil that appears 
 in our actions is only the outgrowth of 
 inherited evil. If we are good, we cannot 
 help it, because our ancestors have been 
 good; and if we are bad, we are not respon- 
 sible for it, because it is the direct out- 
 growth of some evil that we have inherited. 
 This is fatalism pure and simple. It denies 
 entirely the freedom of the will, and makes 
 man a mere machine, a characterless au- 
 tomaton, without the power of volition. 
 Here is one who says: "There is no use 
 for me to try to be moral, decent, and 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL Q5 
 
 good, because this old blood that I inherit 
 from my ancestors makes me a born villain 
 and a perpetual scoundrel." The person 
 who talks that way is acting the part of 
 the veriest coward, and by his mental 
 attitude, as well as actions, is giving the 
 wholesale denial to one of the great funda- 
 mental teachings of God's Word, that 
 "where sin abounded grace did much more 
 abound," and "for this cause the Son of 
 God was manifested, that he might destroy 
 the works of the devil." In the realm of 
 Divine grace all are held as morally ac- 
 countable for what thej^ do, however strong 
 their inherited inclinations toward evil. All 
 are amenable before God to use all the 
 energy of soul and all the grace that God 
 will give to them in fighting against these 
 evil tendencies and in doing right even with 
 a nature that may have received an inherited 
 bent toward the wrong. Many of the 
 noblest souls that have blessed humanity 
 by their labors have sprung from the 
 most unpromising moral stock. They have 
 become so sound and pure as to be totally 
 unlike their parents, and the centers of 
 
66 SIX FOOLS 
 
 the most wholesome and gracious influ- 
 ences. Restraining and conquering their 
 inbred tendencies to evil, they have won 
 the esteem and veneration of the world. 
 Michael Faraday came of the humblest 
 and poorest parentage, the family living 
 in London all huddled together in a little 
 single room over a livery stable, in which 
 the father was employed as a helper. He 
 began life as a newsboy, became an errand 
 boy in Sir Humphry Davy's chemical 
 laboratory, and then one of the wonders 
 of the age in science. When Sir Humphry 
 Davy was once asked: "What do you 
 regard as your greatest discovery .f^" he 
 replied, "Michael Faraday." John Tyndall 
 said of Michael Faraday: "He was the 
 greatest experimental philosopher that the 
 world has ever seen." 
 
 Henry Wilson received as his inheritance 
 from his father, who was a lazy, shiftless, 
 illiterate, drunken loafer, a terrible appetite 
 for liquor, against which he fought all his 
 life and always victorious. The name he 
 bore was not his real name, for when he 
 came of age he took another name to 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 67 
 
 escape in some measure the odium of his 
 father's worthless life. He was cradled in 
 poverty. Many a time when a child he 
 cried for bread when there was none to 
 give him. Bound out at the age of ten 
 to a farmer, who was a hard taskmaster, 
 he worked for him like a slave until he 
 was twenty-one. Allowed to attend school 
 but one month in each year, yet during 
 the eleven years of his bondage he read 
 through over one thousand books that he 
 obtained from the neighboring village 
 library, making their contents all his own. 
 His scholastic training, which was limited 
 to a few terms in the academy, did not 
 begin until he had reached an age when 
 others have finished theirs. In spite of 
 these almost overwhelming obstacles, he 
 steadily grew in character, influence, and 
 power, until he was elected to the Massa- 
 chusetts State Legislature. There he made 
 his famous speech against slavery, that 
 drew to him the eyes of the whole nation. 
 He was recognized as a mighty political 
 leader, and as one of the greatest orators 
 of the anti-slavery times. After seventeen 
 
68 SIX FOOLS 
 
 years of conspicuous and honored service 
 as a member of the United States Senate 
 he closed his poHtical career as the nation's 
 Vice-President. 
 
 Dr. Thomas John Barnardo, of London, 
 known throughout the world as "The 
 Father of Nobody's Children," demon- 
 strated through his lifework that moral 
 character of the strongest and best fiber 
 can be developed from the most unprom- 
 ising moral stock. He was a man of 
 intense Christian devotion and consecration. 
 While a young student of medicine in 
 London, fitting himself to go to China as 
 a medical missionary, he received what 
 was to him a special call to devote his life 
 to work among the neglected people of 
 London. Beginning there his lifework by 
 helping one boy, who had no home, he 
 soon came to know of the frightful condi- 
 tion of multitudes of homeless children. 
 After having completed his medical course 
 he first used a donkey stable as a place 
 of refuge for his boys. This humble re- 
 treat grew until it had expanded into 
 magnificent buildings, that covered whole 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 69 
 
 blocks, accommodating thousands of chil- 
 dren, who were taken from the London 
 slums, were given schooling and industrial 
 training, were saved from careers of vice 
 and crime and were enabled to achieve 
 honorable positions in life. He instituted 
 an emigration agency which provided for 
 the transportation of young people to 
 Canada and Australia. Tens of thousands 
 of hopeless outcast boys and girls who had 
 been rescued, reclaimed, and educated by 
 this man were sent out into all the lands 
 where English power has gone. Dr. Bar- 
 nardo delivered public addresses upon his 
 work all over Great Britain, and he re- 
 peatedly declared that it was proven by 
 statistics, which they kept most carefully 
 from year to year, that ninety-five per 
 cent of his boys and girls turned out well. 
 The New York Children's Aid Society, 
 during the more than a half century that 
 it has been in existence, has gathered up 
 more than fifty thousand children, most of 
 them little street waifs, boys and girls who 
 have been the products of the New York 
 slums, and has sent them westward, where 
 
70 SIX FOOLS 
 
 they have been taken into the homes of 
 farmers and others and reared to manhood 
 and womanhood. Two Httle waifs, com- 
 panions in poverty, were picked up by this 
 society in the streets of New York, sent 
 west, and were adopted into the famihes 
 of Indiana farmers. They occupied the 
 same car seat on their westward journey, 
 munched their sandwiches together, drank 
 out of the same tin cup, took bites out of 
 the same apple, and wondered what kind 
 of homes they were going to get into, when 
 they got out West. One of them became 
 a Hoosier schoolmaster and the governor 
 of Alaska; the other worked his way 
 through college and went to North Dakota, 
 where he became the governor of that 
 commonwealth. It is conservatively esti- 
 mated from the reports of the agents of 
 this society, and from letters received from 
 the homes in which these children have 
 been placed, that at least ninety per cent 
 of them turn out well. Booker T. Wash- 
 ington, born a slave in a log cabin, where 
 his mother was cook for the plantation 
 farm house, sleeping in a pallet on the 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 71 
 
 dirt floor of the kitchen, where he first 
 saw the light, had as his principal garment 
 during his boyhood days a long tow shirt 
 made from the roughest part of the flax. 
 When we see him learning to read by walk- 
 ing ten miles every day to and from the 
 home of his teacher, after his day's work 
 was done, it looks like a long, hard journey 
 from this condition of illiteracy to grad- 
 uating with highest honors at Hampton 
 Institute. It is a wide remove from 
 wearing a tow-shirt to the wearing of the 
 classic cap and gown in receiving his 
 honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from 
 Harvard University, and from eating corn 
 bread and bacon with his fingers out of 
 a tin pan in a slave's hut to dining with 
 the president of Harvard at his home in 
 Cambridge, and as an invited guest eating 
 at the same table with our nation's Chief 
 Magistrate in the White House at Wash- 
 ington. From lowliest surroundings often 
 spring noblest souls, even as from darkest 
 soils there grow fairest flowers. 
 
 Alfred Russel Wallace has defined his 
 position upon this subject of heredity, in 
 
72 SIX FOOLS 
 
 which he takes the strongest grounds 
 against reckoning with fatalism as an 
 admitted factor in human Hfe. He says: 
 "The men whose originaUty and mental 
 power have created landmarks in the his- 
 tory of human progress have been self- 
 taught. They have certainly derived noth- 
 ing from the training of their ancestors 
 in their several departments of knowledge." 
 Superexcellence in any business or in any 
 profession appears not so much an inherited 
 gift as the result of self-discipline, self- 
 training, and self-culture. It matters not 
 whether a boy is born in a log cabin or 
 in a mansion, in a cottage or in a brown- 
 stone front, if he is actuated by a noble, 
 mighty, controlling, all-dominating purpose, 
 neither men nor demons can keep him 
 from coming to the front and gaining 
 success and honor. More than a century 
 and a half ago Alexander Pope, in his 
 "Essay on Man," expressed this great 
 truth, which is confirmed to-day by some 
 of our best modern scientists: 
 
 Honor and shame from no condition rise; 
 Act well your part: there all the honor lies. 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 73 
 
 In Rehoboam's time it was very evident 
 that in their confederation the twelve tribes 
 had been imperfectly united. A deeply 
 rooted jealousy manifested itself between 
 the tribes of Israel in general and the tribe 
 of Judah in particular. The powerful 
 Ephraimites would not submit to being 
 curtailed in their power and authority or 
 reduced to any inferior position. They 
 felt most keenly the omission as an affront 
 if they were not consulted with reference 
 to any new enterprise that might be under- 
 taken by any of the confederated tribes. 
 AYhen, immediately succeeding the death 
 of Saul, the tribe of Judah, without wait- 
 ing to consult the other tribes, came 
 together and crowned David as their king, 
 intertribal war broke out, and it continued 
 until the house of Saul was almost exter- 
 minated before David's government was 
 accepted and acknowledged by the whole 
 nation. The latent jealousy was not entirely 
 uprooted even then, for other differences 
 arose that tended to increase the trouble. 
 David transferred his court from Shechem, 
 the ancient capital, to Jerusalem, and also 
 
74 SIX FOOLS 
 
 removed the tabernacle from Shiloh thither, 
 making Jerusalem the religious and political 
 capital of his newly acquired kingdom. The 
 Ephraimites and all the other tribes, that 
 were in full sympathy with them, felt that 
 these distinctions bestowed on Judah were 
 slights cast upon themselves. Solomon's 
 extravagant expenditures had imposed 
 heavy burdens on the people which they 
 were not willing to bear. His reign had 
 been prosperous and magnificent, yet by 
 reason of its excessive taxation it had 
 proven so oppressive that large numbers 
 of the people were ready upon the first 
 favorable opportunity to protest and to 
 rebel. 
 
 The day that Rehoboam was crowned 
 as king furnished that opportunity. If 
 ever it was needed that a young man 
 should consult and act upon the advice 
 of those older and wiser than himself, 
 should show tact, good judgment, and con- 
 ciliatory ways, it was then. The corona- 
 tion day came. The sacred oil was out- 
 poured upon the bending head of the 
 young monarch. The resplendent crown, 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 75 
 
 glittering with burnished gold and sparkling 
 with precious stones, was placed upon his 
 head. But no glad shouts greeted the 
 newly crowned king. An ominous silence 
 reigned, and a sullen gloom was seen rest- 
 ing upon the upturned faces of the multi- 
 tude. Rehoboam, pale and nervous, knew 
 not what to do. Jeroboam now stepped 
 quickly to the front as the champion for 
 the rights of the people, and looking Reho- 
 boam full in the face, he boldly said: "Thy 
 father made our yoke grievous. Make 
 thou the grievous service of thy father, 
 and the heavy yoke, which he put upon 
 us, lighter, and we will serve thee." Reho- 
 boam desired three days for considering 
 this important matter. He called first a 
 council of the old and experienced states- 
 men, and after hearing their advice he 
 summoned a convention of the young men, 
 the empty-headed fops, who had been his 
 boon companions before his accession to 
 the throne. He rejected the gentle and 
 conciliatory measures that were recom- 
 mended by the wise, gray -headed coun- 
 selors, and accepted the foolish, senseless. 
 
76 SIX FOOLS 
 
 and almost idiotic advice that was given 
 him by those young bloods in the vealy 
 stage of their mental development. At 
 the end of the allotted time he said to the 
 people: "My little finger shall be thicker 
 than my father's loins. Whereas my father 
 put a heavy yoke upon you, I will put 
 more to your yoke. My father chastised 
 you with whips, but I will chastise you 
 with scorpions." Such scourging words 
 bore at once inflammatory fruitage; the 
 pent-up indignation of the people burst 
 into open revolt; the ten tribes quickly 
 separated from the other two; the covenant 
 nation was rent in twain. 
 
 The great principles in the philosophy of 
 history have found their counterpart in 
 every country and in every age. Tj^ranny 
 and cruelty upon the part of the ruler 
 have often resulted in open revolt and 
 rebellion upon the part of the people. 
 But the great national upheavals that 
 have followed, under a benignant Prov- 
 idence, have always borne the rich fruits 
 of a larger, broader liberty and a better, 
 nobler peace. Think of the times when 
 
 I 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 77 
 
 the mandates of despotic power have 
 scourged the land with consuming torch 
 and murderous dagger, with widespread 
 devastation and cruel bloodshed; times 
 when liberty, right, equality, justice all 
 seem to have sunk into the chaos of an- 
 archy: yet out of these charred and black- 
 ened ruins there have sprung, like the 
 growth from the dragon's teeth of old 
 from Grecian soil, the elements of a new 
 life, the germ principles of something 
 grander, nobler, and better. The conquer- 
 ing legions of Alexander opened the hitherto 
 barred gateways of the savage East for 
 the entrance of the arts and civil institu- 
 tions of Greece. Constantinople in the 
 middle of the fifteenth century was stormed 
 and pillaged by the Turks, after one of 
 the most cruel and bloody sieges known 
 in history. But, like the branch of the 
 odorous gum tree, that sends forth its 
 sweetest fragrance only after it has been 
 bruised and broken, so this city of the 
 Byzantine emperors sent up from its ruins 
 the mighty impulse of the New Learning, 
 that thrilled all Europe into a new moral 
 
78 SIX FOOLS 
 
 and intellectual life. Listen to the funereal 
 tones of the bell of the Saint Germain 
 L'Auxerrois, as it rings out the death knell 
 for thousands of happy homes in France 
 upon the morning of Saint Bartholomew's 
 Day. Its first notes have scarcely died 
 away before the first Huguenot is ruth- 
 lessly struck down. The air is rent with 
 shrieks of agony, and the streets of France 
 run red with innocent blood, while the 
 bell tolls out its sad refrain. But amid 
 that discord we can now catch the rich 
 refrain of a * 'harmony not then under- 
 stood." There is a chime of sweetest 
 music, that speaks above the harsh clangor 
 of that bell, that tells of the grand future 
 of religious freedom. The maxim of Louis 
 XIV of France, "I am the state," was the 
 synonym for a most despotic and arbitrary 
 government. His age was most brilliant in 
 literature, in commerce, and in art; yet 
 his corrupt and profligate reign, with its 
 exorbitant taxation, paved the way for the 
 French Revolution, which in its death 
 agonies gave birth to that principle of 
 liberty which has found its full fruition 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 79 
 
 in the French RepubHc of to-day. Out of 
 the throes of our own Civil War there 
 came the destruction of State sovereignty, a 
 restored Union, and Kberty for the slave, 
 and, surely, these factors, made secure in 
 our nation's life, were worth all that it 
 cost to get them. 
 
 So the open revolt of the people against 
 Rehoboam and the bitter and destructive 
 wars that ensued led the way eventually 
 to the greater national prosperity and to 
 the larger spiritual blessings of the later 
 reigns of Asa and Jehoshaphat. 
 
 Rehoboam 's unfortunate career continued 
 just as it had begun. Folly and failure 
 were its most distinguishing traits. 
 
 Every young person starting out in life 
 may take the wise admonitions of competent 
 counselors, or he may act upon the shallow 
 and senseless teachings of those who are 
 giddy, fast, and rash, and who speak most 
 contemptuously of their seniors as "old 
 fogies"; and as a direct consequence of 
 following their counsels he may at an early 
 age end his life in wreck and ruin. Stand- 
 ing within the full shadow cast by Reho- 
 
80 SIX FOOLS 
 
 boam's bad beginning and resulting failure, 
 we emphasize the necessity of getting the 
 right start in life. As all depends upon 
 our getting the right start, all education, 
 both of the home and the school, should 
 be helpful toward making the proper be- 
 ginning in life. Starting right leads into 
 the only pathway of happiness, for one is 
 never so happy as when he is successfully 
 engaged in doing that which he can do 
 well. It is the only path to real worth, for 
 the value of an individual to society de- 
 pends upon his being in the right place 
 and doing his own appropriate work. It 
 is the only path to national prosperity. 
 The growth and perfection of the body 
 depend upon each organ fulfilling its own 
 functions, and the health and development 
 of the body politic depend upon each 
 individual understanding and developing 
 his own powers and building his own best 
 work into the great structure of the whole. 
 When a young person stands facing the 
 years that lie before him, the most serious 
 question that confronts him is whether he 
 is going to succeed or not. It must be 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 81 
 
 understood that what God makes a boy 
 by nature stands in a certain kind of 
 fixed relation to what that boy will be 
 able to make out of himself by growth 
 and acquirement. Many of the failures of 
 life are due to people working at cross 
 purposes with their own aptitudes. God 
 made us all to be good for something; but 
 the key to success is lodged somewhere 
 within ourselves, and the chief thing, para- 
 mount to all else, is to get hold of the 
 right key. God meant something in bring- 
 ing every one of us into existence. Every 
 man's life is a plan of God, and the first 
 thing for us to do is to get at God's meaning 
 in our separate creations. Men are con- 
 stantly making failures in life because 
 they are trying to do what, from the 
 human standpoint, God never intended 
 them to do. 
 
 Our solar system gets along very well 
 so long as each planet moves in its own 
 orbit. But suppose Mercury and Venus 
 should try to run on the same road in- 
 stead of the different tracks in which they 
 now travel; suppose the earth and Mars 
 
82 SIX FOOLS 
 
 should try to change places; suppose Jupi- 
 ter and Saturn should seek to get out of 
 their old established routes and then run 
 to suit themselves, what would be the 
 result? Our solar system would come to 
 an end in a most tremendous smash-up. 
 God has marked out orbits for men as 
 well as for planets, and men fall far short 
 of success and go under because they fail 
 to find the path in which God intended 
 them to move. We find many misfits in 
 business and professional life, because of 
 the failure of men at the very threshold 
 of life honestly, seriously, and candidly to 
 take an inventory of what they have in its 
 direct relation to what they expect to do. 
 We find professional men who have failed 
 to make good who would have made fine 
 business men; poor business men who would 
 have made good professional men; unsuc- 
 cessful lawyers who would have made 
 successful physicians; mediocre physicians 
 who would have made splendid lawyers; 
 preachers who are flat failures in the 
 ministry but who would have been very 
 successful in something else. A friend of 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 83 
 
 mine who is in the work of the ministry 
 in another denomination has a son, now in 
 middle Hfe, who as soon as he could walk 
 and talk manifested a perfect passion for 
 machinery. When only a small boy he 
 learned perfectly the mechanism of an 
 engine. He made a small engine with his 
 own hands that ran perfectly. He could 
 think and talk of nothing but engines. 
 After the completion of his high school 
 course, his father sent him to college, but 
 at the end of the freshman year he came 
 home declaring that he had no taste for 
 the studies that were most prominent in 
 that college curriculum, and that he would 
 never go back. He started in half a dozen 
 different lines of business and failed at 
 every one of them through lack of aptitude. 
 At last he got into a railroad machine shop 
 and settled down at what he knew was 
 his life's work. He became a self-made 
 mechanical engineer, and is now at the 
 head of a department in one of the great- 
 est manufacturing plants in the world. 
 
 Efficiency experts can now be secured for 
 all lines of productive industries, whose 
 
84 SIX FOOLS 
 
 business it is to investigate and then in- 
 form boards of managers how losses can 
 be stopped, how waste can be ehminated, 
 and how the machinery of the plant can 
 be operated at the least expense. We have 
 church efficiency experts, whose advice is 
 now sought in deciding upon the best 
 locations for new city churches, in defining 
 the kind of a church which should be 
 built to fit a given neighborhood, and in 
 rearranging the working program of the 
 downtown church to suit changed condi- 
 tions. Should we not have efficiency ex- 
 perts in our universities, colleges, and high 
 schools, whose business it should be, after 
 a careful study of the individual adapt- 
 abilit}^ to suggest to each student a group 
 of activities in the lifework for which he 
 is best suited, and thus by eliminating the 
 waste of time that comes from misapplied 
 energy, endeavor to fit him at once into 
 his life task by gi^ang him the right start? 
 Wise counsel for the right start in life is 
 needed now as much as in Rehoboam's day. 
 It is to our highest advantage, intel- 
 lectually and morally, to gather around us 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 85 
 
 the right sort of friends and companions. 
 That was a very suggestive placard that 
 hung in a store window — "A large stock of 
 goods and civility always on hand." If 
 a reasonable amount of civility is expected 
 in getting and holding custom and trade, 
 it must also be manifested in securing and 
 retaining our friends. "A man that hath 
 friends must show himself friendly." But 
 we must go deeper than the outer conduct 
 to find the fundamental and abiding prin- 
 ciple of true friendship. We must learn to 
 love humanity, we must get into cordial 
 relations with those about us, we must 
 secure the responsive feeling to the wants 
 and needs of the universal human heart, 
 that "touch of sympathy" which "makes 
 the whole world akin," we must acquire 
 the spirit of genuine helpfulness, and then 
 friends will come to us because we shall 
 then be able to give to them in wealth of 
 character what they in a noble reciprocity 
 will be able to impart to us in riches of 
 soul. The wily politician, who seeks friends 
 only in order that he may use them for 
 promoting his own selfish interests, has 
 
86 SIX FOOLS 
 
 always been treated with the just contempt 
 that he has deserved. But the abihty to 
 secure and to hold friends has always been 
 one of the largest factors in the way to 
 true success. 
 
 Some of Lincoln's enemies sneeringly 
 said of him in the early part of his career, 
 "Lincoln has no capital but a lot of friends." 
 But it was Lincoln's immeasurable capacity 
 for friendship that made his splendid career 
 possible; his ability to make and to hold 
 friends was one of the greatest elements 
 that led to his becoming the nation's Chief 
 Magistrate. 
 
 Garfield possessed in a marked degree 
 this same magnificent quality, that pre- 
 pared for him so large a place in the hearts 
 of the American people. He often visited 
 the great industrial plants in the manu- 
 facturing towns of his congressional dis- 
 trict, and would always stop and shake 
 hands and converse with almost every 
 begrimed and smut-covered laborer in the 
 establishment. Not even Garfield's bitter- 
 est political enemies ever accused him of 
 doing this to win votes; for they w^ell knew 
 
THE COMPANIOIV FOOL 87 
 
 it was all prompted by his inherent large- 
 heartedness, by his genuine love for men. 
 He was always deeply interested in the 
 welfare of the laboring classes, for he well 
 remembered the time when he himself was 
 a poor, barefoot farmer's boy; when he 
 drove the mules upon the towpath of the 
 Erie canal at ten dollars a month and his 
 board; when he took that contract at his 
 northern Ohio home for chopping one hun- 
 dred cords of wood at twenty-five cents 
 a cord, to earn the money that would give 
 him a start toward defraying the expenses 
 of a college education. He became in this 
 way most closely allied with the toiling 
 millions of the country. He was prepared 
 to represent the people because he was 
 always in sympathy with the masses. 
 When he lay in the White House, wounded 
 and dying, his physicians advised a change 
 to the air of the seashore, and his special 
 train from Washington to Long Branch was 
 driven at a high rate of speed, making as 
 few stops as possible along the route. 
 Multiplied thousands gathered at the differ- 
 ent stations along the line, and stood there 
 
88 SIX FOOLS 
 
 sorrowful and silent, with uncovered heads, 
 while the train swept on. A brief stop was 
 made at one small station, where some 
 sweat-covered laboring men quickly rolled 
 some baggage trucks up close to the Pres- 
 ident's car and climbed up on them to 
 get a look at their wounded and dying 
 chief. The attendants quickly started to 
 the door of the Pullman to order them to 
 get down and be gone at once. The 
 President saw it all, and was deeply moved 
 at the scene. With his weak and trembling 
 voice he said: "Do not drive those poor 
 men away. It can do me no harm. Let 
 them be gratified." When the train started 
 he gave to that little group of common 
 day laborers a kindly smile and a gentle 
 wave of his feeble hand in response to their 
 tearful interest. With Garfield the insignia 
 and adornment of high ofiicial position 
 never covered up his manhood; and in his 
 death we lost not only a good President but 
 a still greater man and Christian brother. 
 
 Men and women of the strongest char- 
 acter have always felt the large debt which 
 they have owed to the soulful intimacy of 
 
 I 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 89 
 
 the closest friendships. All true friendship 
 must rest upon the foundation of mutual 
 confidence, and the deepest friendship re- 
 quires similarity of sympathy and prin- 
 ciples. It requires the same general trend 
 and quality of life, together with such 
 personal differences as make one friend the 
 complement of the other. Such friends are 
 like complementary colors, which are so 
 related to each other that when blended 
 together they produce white light, and are 
 so named because each color makes up 
 to the other what it lacks to make it white. 
 They thus belong to one another, and 
 each is the brighter and better for the 
 presence of the other. 
 
 The friendship between David and Jon- 
 athan deserves to be regarded as one of 
 the most perfect, one of the most beau- 
 tiful, that has ever been known. Their 
 friendship began upon the day of David's 
 return from the victory over the Philistine 
 giant, and continued without a single 
 break until death divided them. When 
 David, returning from his victory over 
 Goliath, was met by the companies of 
 
90 SIX FOOLS 
 
 women out of all the cities of Israel with 
 instruments of music, singing their joyful 
 song of welcome to the home-coming con- 
 queror, and that great tide of bitter jealousy 
 surged through the soul of Saul, Jonathan, 
 looking upon this young man who was to 
 be king instead of himself, was unenvious. 
 That which aroused Saul to hatred moved 
 Jonathan to love. Such beautiful mag- 
 nanimity of spirit aroused the best that 
 was in David in response. Ancient cove- 
 nants of friendship were sometimes made 
 between two persons by the intermingling 
 of blood, transfusing the same in small 
 quantity from the veins in the arm of the 
 one to that of the other. The covenant 
 of friendship established between David and 
 Jonathan may have been of this kind, and 
 this may be the explanation for that state- 
 ment about them: '*The soul of Jonathan 
 was knit with the soul of David, and 
 Jonathan loved him as his own soul." 
 When David was a fleeing and hunted 
 fugitive, Jonathan frequently sought him 
 out in his hiding places, comforted and 
 encouraged him, cheered bim with assur- 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 91 
 
 ances of the time that was near at hand, 
 when his troubles and dangers would cease, 
 when his edict of banishment would be 
 revoked and he should become Israel's 
 king. Jonathan, above all, poured into 
 his aching heart the healing balm of reli- 
 gious consolation. "He strengthened his 
 hand in God." David "behaved himself 
 wisely in all his ways." His trust was in 
 the Lord, and thus did he voice his faith 
 in God: "In God have I put my trust: 
 I will not be afraid what man can do unto 
 me." "And the Lord was with him." 
 Jonathan's noble character was also dis- 
 closed by his filial devotion to his unfor- 
 tunate father, and he showed the same 
 trust in God that David manifested. This 
 religious tie knit their hearts all the more 
 closely together. David possessed rare 
 accomplishments. He was a poet and a 
 musician, and was faithful and courageous 
 even to heroism. How the true warrior 
 spirit shone out in him when, as a young 
 shepherd lad, he appeared before Saul, 
 whose first impulse was to rebuke him for 
 his temerity in daring to go out against the 
 
92 SIX FOOLS 
 
 mighty Philistine champion. But the king 
 found as he questioned him that this "son 
 of Jesse the Bethlehemite" feared no being 
 but God. He modestly recounted how when 
 he was a servant keeping his father's sheep, 
 a lion and a bear attacking the flock, he 
 had slain them both; and he declared, in 
 a spirit of invincible valor, that the uncir- 
 cumcised Philistine would be as one of 
 them in that he had defied the armies of 
 the living God. Jonathan was also a brave 
 and fearless soldier, and had performed 
 some very daring feats of arms. Accom- 
 panied only by his armor-bearer, he had 
 captured a mountain fortress of the Phil- 
 istines. Thus they were mutually drawn 
 the one to the other, because each one 
 possessed attracting qualities. Their friend- 
 ship was disinterested, unselfish, and recip- 
 rocally helpful. Its bonds held as strongly 
 in adversity as in prosperity. It was 
 faithful and constant to the end. 
 
 Many a person can point to some long 
 friendship which has been to him a con- 
 tinuous source of inspiration and comfort, 
 a friendship which went on in the ordinary 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 93 
 
 round of life with the usual interchange of 
 work and play, with the talk about books 
 and business, about neighbors and old 
 memories, until that person woke up after 
 a time to find himself another person, 
 remade by another's personality. The one 
 who has come under such formative influ- 
 ence has journeyed slowly to the other's 
 point of view. He has heard the story of 
 the other's crises; of the stress of his 
 struggles; how he felt at this crucial mo- 
 ment and that; how bitter were certain 
 great disappointments, which afterward 
 yielded the peaceable fruits of righteousness; 
 how some oppressive burdens of sorrow, 
 which seemed at the time greater than 
 could possibly be borne, lifted the soul to 
 a firmer grasp upon God and to a stronger 
 faith in the unseen things which are 
 eternal. Thus the one whose life has been 
 recreated has gone on stage by stage, 
 living the life of the other, seeing and 
 feeling things as the other has seen and 
 felt them, until he has at last been trans- 
 formed into the likeness of the other, "into 
 the same image and from glory to glory." 
 
94 SIX FOOLS 
 
 The deepest and most enduring friend- 
 ship among men can be found only in the 
 religious atmosphere and in supreme love 
 to God. Jesus spent the whole night in 
 prayer just before he chose his disciple- 
 friends. He said later concerning these 
 hours spent in prayer over the choice of 
 his disciples, ''Thine they were, and thou 
 gavest them to me." When men succeed 
 in finding a real spiritual leader the union 
 between him and them is a union that 
 has been made in heaven. Can we under- 
 stand what Jesus's capacity for friendship 
 really meant, when he said to them, "I 
 have called you friends".^ The greatest 
 change that this world has ever witnessed 
 grew out of that friendship between Christ 
 and his disciples, and the gospel story that 
 tells about it. The disciples, whom Jesus 
 called into his service, were fishermen, 
 tanners, and publicans — all men who were 
 taken from the common walks of life. 
 They were not exceptional men in any 
 sense of the word, and were very immature 
 at the time they were first called. They 
 were poorly informed and furnished as to 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 95 
 
 education, and exceedingly limited in spir- 
 itual experience. These men listened daily 
 to his teachings as they traveled about 
 with him on foot from place to place, often 
 wearied with their long overland journeys. 
 The touch and influence of his powerful 
 personality are especially brought out in 
 one vivid incident. They had been in 
 labors abundant, and were very weary 
 from a hard day's march, as they drew 
 near to a village, where they expected to 
 find rest and refreshment. But the mes- 
 sengers whom they had sent on ahead 
 met them when they came up with un- 
 pleasant news. They were told that they 
 would not be received. Only those who 
 know what it is to be refused hospitality 
 when they are weary and hungry can 
 understand what this message meant to 
 them. Such moments will show the real 
 man, for then he is off his guard. There 
 was nothing to do but to tramp on; so on 
 they went. But the disciples were angry 
 and spoke hot words, desiring Elijah's 
 power to call down fire on that village 
 and consume it. Jesus was as hungry 
 
96 
 
 SIX FOOLS 
 
 and as weary as any of them, "but he 
 turned and rebuked them and said: Ye 
 know not what manner of spirit ye are 
 of. For the Son of man is not come 
 to destroy men's hves, but to save them." 
 Thus Jesus took these men into his friend- 
 ship and companionship and changed them 
 from ordinary into extraordinary moral 
 forces. He took these plain, ignorant men 
 and through his daily association with 
 them transformed them into the trained 
 and cultured leaders of that new kingdom 
 that was to change the world. He took 
 common stones and made them into mighty 
 foundations for the new Jerusalem. He 
 transformed the charcoal into diamonds. 
 How profound, therefore, is the underlying 
 philosophy of his words — "I have called 
 you friends; all things that I have heard 
 of my Father, I have made known unto 
 you"! The scribes, the Pharisees, the 
 elders, the high priests, and many others 
 who studied these disciples at close hand 
 "perceived that they were unlearned and 
 ignorant men." But when they saw how 
 they had been made magnetic and thrilling 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 97 
 
 with a new power — a power that drew 
 people to them wherever they went, that 
 had made them moral giants in attacking 
 the evils of their time, and that had clothed 
 their words with fire when they spoke — 
 "they marveled, and they took knowledge 
 of them that they had been with Jesus." 
 It is our precious privilege to come into 
 the circle of the same friendship and com- 
 panionship of the One who will give to 
 us like knowledge and wisdom, like courage 
 and moral power. 
 
 One of the never-ending series of life's 
 tragedies arises from the frequent choice 
 that people make of bad companionships, 
 when they might have chosen the good. 
 I heard John B. Gough in his great lec- 
 ture on "Man and His Masters," which 
 he delivered hundreds of times in all parts 
 of the globe, during his forty years upon 
 the lecture platform, say with all the im- 
 passioned fervor of his great soul, "Young 
 man, I would willingly give my right hand 
 if I could forget all that I have learned 
 from bad company." 
 
 The Chicago dailies told recently of the 
 
98 SIX FOOLS 
 
 body of a young man apparently between 
 twenty-five and thirty years of age that 
 was removed from the Chicago River. 
 Before committing suicide by jumping into 
 the water he had gone through all the 
 clothing that he was wearing and had 
 deliberately cut out the initials of his 
 name and the laundry mark so as to render 
 identification impossible. But this note 
 was found in his pocket written with an 
 indelible pencil: "I got in with a bad bunch, 
 and whisky did the rest. I do not wish 
 to be known. I want my name and my 
 memory to perish with me." In less than 
 two weeks after the remains of that young 
 man had been buried in the potter's field, 
 the Chicago chief of police received over 
 one hundred letters from anxious parents 
 scattered all over northern Illinois, Indiana, 
 and Iowa, asking for a full description of 
 that body. There are multitudes of par- 
 ents all over our land whose sons have 
 gotten into the wrong crowd and are known 
 to be going the pace that kills. Many a 
 mother has been almost broken-hearted 
 over the boy who has gone forth from the 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 99 
 
 loving home circle and is now traveling 
 the path of the prodigal in some far country. 
 Many a father has had his last days filled 
 with the wormwood and the gall of bitter- 
 ness because of the ineffaceable disgrace 
 brought upon the family through the ac- 
 tions of a profligate son. 
 
 Warning comes from all sources against 
 bad company. It comes from the old 
 home, to which the ruined young man 
 has been brought back, that he may be 
 nursed in his dying moments by the lov- 
 ing mother who cared for him so tenderly 
 in his boyhood. It comes from the city 
 hospital, where the pitiful wreck of a once 
 promising young manhood has been car- 
 ried to die among strangers. It comes 
 from the haunts of vice, where the victim 
 of sin dies, and with his last breath re- 
 proaches the evil companions who led him 
 astray. It comes from the convict's cell, 
 where the young prisoner tells the visitor 
 that bad company brought him to ruin. 
 It comes from the deathbed, where the 
 young infidel dies in despair and denounces 
 the companions who taught him his first 
 
100 SIX FOOLS 
 
 lessons in infidelity. It comes from the 
 scaffold or from the electric chair, where 
 the criminal about to suffer the extreme 
 penalty of the law, with arms pinioned and 
 with his last spoken words, just before the 
 black cap is drawn over his face and the 
 sheriff's finger touches the fatal button or 
 his foot presses the deadly trigger, warns 
 all young men to beware of bad company. 
 The warning comes from all these sources 
 trumpet-tongued: "Enter not into the path 
 of the wicked, and go not in the way of 
 evil men. Avoid it, pass not by it, turn 
 from it and pass away." 
 
 There are thousands of young men in 
 our land to-day who were brought up in 
 religious homes, but who have now thrown 
 off all religious restraint. Sometimes, when 
 the finer chords of feeling are touched, 
 memory will revert to those scenes of the 
 old home life. Here is a picture that 
 stands out with startling clearness when 
 fond memory brings back the light of 
 other days. There stands the old home- 
 stead, in which childhood's happy days 
 were spent. There are the trees, that 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 101 
 
 grew there, planted by loving hands long 
 since crumbled back to dust; the flowers 
 that bloomed by the window; the vines 
 that climbed the wall; the brook that 
 went babbling along through the meadow, 
 beating out its merry music. There is the 
 sitting room, where so many happy hours 
 were spent in loving family companionship; 
 the old family Bible, lying there upon the 
 center table, with all the striking passages 
 and the great promises marked in father's 
 well-known and familiar hand, and the 
 recollection of father leading in the morning 
 family worship. There arises the vision 
 of that beloved mother, now in the Father's 
 house above, who taught the wayward boy, 
 with clasped hands, to say, "Our Father, 
 which art in heaven." Then there came 
 that final morning for leaving the old 
 home and all its precious associations. 
 How mother's voice was so full of tears 
 that she could not speak; how father's 
 face twitched with the emotion that he 
 could scarcely control; how his voice trem- 
 bled, when he said: "God bless you, my 
 boy! God bless you!" Ah! how remorse 
 
102 SIX FOOLS 
 
 stings to the very depths of the soul when 
 the promises are remembered, given then 
 to father and to mother: never to touch 
 the intoxicating cup, never to gamble, to 
 avoid bad company, to read the Bible, to 
 remember the Sabbath Day to keep it 
 holy, and to attend the services of God's 
 house — those promises broken again and 
 again. How many young men there are 
 to-day who have broken those sacred vows 
 — vows given not only to Christian parents 
 but vows given to God. 
 
 A young prince, heir to the throne of 
 Russia, gave himself over to a wild and 
 dissolute life. Taking up his residence in 
 Paris for a time, he went the rounds of 
 dissipation. One evening as he was seated 
 in a place of evil resort with a number 
 of young profligates like himself, drinking, 
 gambling, and making merry, a special 
 messenger came to him and privately an- 
 nounced to him that his father was dead. 
 Pushing away from him the cards, the dice, 
 and the wine cup, he rose up and said: 
 "I am emperor. Henceforth I shall live 
 as becometh the Czar of all the Russias. 
 
THE COMPANION FOOL 103 
 
 I am through with these playthings, and 
 I am through with you. Good night, 
 gentlemen, and good-by forever." And he 
 stuck to that resolution. God has en- 
 dowed every one with a spiritual birth- 
 right. Christ calls all to reign with him 
 in his spiritual kingdom. "And I appoint 
 unto you a kingdom as my Father hath 
 appointed unto me." Man's highest am- 
 bition should be to be worthy of such a 
 princely heritage and to aspire to no 
 meaner rank than to be "A king and a 
 priest unto God." 
 
Ill 
 
 THE WOMAN FOOL 
 
A man gains no possession better than a good 
 woman, nothing more horrible than a bad one. — 
 Simonides. 
 
 I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: 
 God Almighty made 'em to match the men. 
 — George Eliot (Mrs. Poyser, in Adam Bede). 
 
 Himself half part of a blessed man, 
 
 Left to be finished by such as she; 
 
 And she a fair, divided excellence, 
 
 Whose fullness of perfection is in him. 
 
 Ah! two such silvered currents when they join, 
 
 Do glorify the banks that bound them in. 
 
 — Shakespeare. 
 
 i 
 
Ill 
 
 THE WOMAN FOOL 
 
 Brought up in the worship of Baal, a 
 god whose teachings are known to have 
 given unquaHfied sanction to everything 
 abandoned and vile, Jezebel, the Sidonian 
 wife of Ahab King of Israel, was in char- 
 acter in full keeping with her iniquitous 
 creed. When a religion teaches immorality 
 there are no depths of depravity to which 
 the men and women who are its adherents 
 may not go. Jezebel was adroit, able, and 
 very clever, yet withal utterly unprincipled. 
 Prepossessing and attractive in personal 
 appearance, and giving great attention to 
 external adornment, yet she was cunning 
 and crafty, sly and deceitful, designing and 
 treacherous. The young king, caught by 
 the outward show and glitter, took the 
 matrimonial step which proved his ruin. 
 Jezebel formed the deliberate purpose of 
 revolutionizing the faith of Israel and 
 
 107 
 
108 SIX FOOLS 
 
 substituting the worship of Baal for the 
 worship of the true God. She secured her 
 husband's permission to bring her idols 
 into Israel, and there arose as if by magic 
 upon almost every hilltop the images of 
 her favorite god. She was also successful 
 in winning the king over to idolatry, and 
 Ahab, under the direction of his artful 
 and wicked queen, built a magnificent 
 ivory temple in Samaria, erecting upon it 
 a colossal statue of the sun-god. She had 
 all the priests of Jehovah, who stood in 
 the way of her efforts to draw the people 
 into the espousal of her idol- worship, put 
 to death with the exception of one hundred, 
 who were secretly hidden away by Obadiah, 
 a good nian and the governor of the king's 
 household. Thus her nefarious purposes 
 were accomplished and Baal -worship be- 
 came the recognized state religion. Out 
 of the numerous hosts of Israel but seven 
 thousand were found who did not bend 
 the knee unto Baal. Jezebel issued a death 
 warrant for Elijah after his signal victory 
 on Mount Carmel, and he was compelled 
 to flee for his life to a distant country. 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 109 
 
 In bringing about the death of Naboth 
 and all his heirs, and making his estate 
 confiscate to the crown, she secured pos- 
 session of the parcel of ground which her 
 husband had coveted. 
 
 Ahab while standing within the desired 
 vineyard and planning how he would lay- 
 out this ill-gotten addition to his palace 
 grounds suddenly and unexpectedly met 
 the prophet, whom he had not seen for 
 five years. Elijah stood there before him 
 black-browed, motionless, grim, like an in- 
 carnate conscience, as unearthly as if he 
 were the ghost of the man whom he had 
 murdered. Ahab's worthless and miserable 
 subterfuges were swept away like chaff as 
 he stood there cringing and melting under 
 the piercing gaze of the blazing eyes of 
 that man of God. He saw the enormity of 
 the crime that he had committed, and his 
 soul withered under the look of that iron 
 prophet of the Lord as the sacrifice on 
 Mount Carmel had shriveled under the 
 fire from heaven. Trembling from head 
 to foot, he gasped out, "Hast thou found 
 me, O mine enemy .^" Elijah, with words 
 
110 SIX FOOLS 
 
 that cut like a Damascus blade into the 
 cowering, cowardly soul of the apostate 
 king, then announced to him that his 
 defection and crimes would be punished 
 with the total destruction of his house. 
 The dogs of the town would lick up his 
 blood in the same place where they had 
 licked up the blood of Naboth. Jezebel 
 also would be dashed down from her 
 high window, and her gore would splash 
 the wall and redden the horses' hoofs. 
 The dogs of the street would snarl over 
 the horrid feast of her mangled body. All 
 this fearful prophecy was fulfilled to the 
 very letter. 
 
 Ahab was fool enough to give his hand 
 in marriage to a woman who without 
 question was the worst female character 
 mentioned in all sacred history. Surely, 
 all unmarried young men, with the example 
 of the wretched career of this ill-mated 
 couple before them, should learn the folly 
 of being allured by outw^ard glitter and 
 show and beauty rather than by sterling 
 worth of moral character. 
 
 Inconsiderate and hasty marriages are 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 111 
 
 a prolific cause of domestic unhappiness. 
 When young men and young women are 
 thrown together how often they show 
 themselves to be fools in forming their 
 matrimonial alliances! How often impulse 
 rules in making the life choice rather 
 than sober judgment. He is drawn to her 
 by her arch smile, by the elegant way she 
 handles her fan and parasol, and the re- 
 fined manner in which she passes around 
 the ice cream at the picnic; while she is 
 attracted to him by the style and color of 
 his cravats, by the pattern and fit of his 
 waistcoat, by the admirable shape of his 
 shoes, and by the graceful manner in which 
 he tips his hat. So they become engaged 
 and in a few weeks are married, when he 
 does not know any more about her real 
 life and her adaptability to the idiosyn- 
 crasies of his disposition than a native 
 Patagonian does about chemistry; and she 
 is as ignorant of his actual character as 
 a Hottentot is of the Hebrew grammar. 
 
 To marry a man who is not industrious 
 and who is unsuccessful is to invite mis- 
 fortune and calamity. A man ought to 
 
112 SIX FOOLS 
 
 be fully persuaded of his ability to take 
 care of a family before he plans to estab- 
 lish a home. Yet a man who is in arrearages 
 on his own board bill, who is everywhere 
 recognized as being constitutionally tired, 
 who is too lazy to earn his own living, 
 and who has been trusted for the very 
 suit of clothes that he wears upon his 
 wedding day, will stand at the marriage 
 altar, will place upon his bride's finger 
 the betrothal ring, that has been bought 
 on credit, and will solemnly say, "With 
 this ring I thee wed and with my worldly 
 goods I thee endow." 
 
 Matrimonial alliances with men of large 
 means are often arranged solely for the 
 social position that wealth will bring. The 
 hand of a young woman who is an heiress 
 is often sought by one who shows in a 
 few months after the marriage ceremony 
 that he cares only for her bank account 
 and nothing for her. To marry a man 
 with a title does not necessarily mark an 
 advance in position or in happiness; it 
 often means wTctchedness and misery. You 
 may place a decoration of nobility upon 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 113 
 
 a wooden dummy, but it still remains a 
 wooden dummy. A count may be of no 
 account, notwithstanding his pretentious 
 title. 
 
 Howells's A Modern Instance shows the 
 evil results that come from an inconsider- 
 ate and hasty marriage. A runaway match, 
 the marriage of two persons who are not 
 at all adapted to each other, and that ends 
 at last in a divorce and in a broken heart 
 and wrecked life for the woman, are the 
 outline facts that the author uses for 
 working out his powerful moral teaching, 
 which drew from the editor of the Century 
 Magazine the declaration upon his editorial 
 page concerning this great novel: "Since 
 Uncle Tom's Cabin no American work of 
 fiction has appeared that has so strong 
 and so wide a moral bearing and so great 
 powers to affect public sentiment." 
 
 Mutual incompatibility is one of the 
 most serious causes of misery in modern 
 home life. It is the gravest mistake for 
 any young man and young woman to get 
 married when they find out beforehand 
 that they are not adapted to each other. 
 
114 SIX FOOLS 
 
 A broken engagement is infinitely better 
 than a broken life. 
 
 Women often show themselves to be 
 fools when they marry men for the purpose 
 of reforming them. Such unions are an- 
 other fruitful cause of infelicity in the 
 marriage relation. It is almost always a 
 fool's errand for the woman who thus 
 marries, and it generally ends in the wreck 
 of two lives instead of one. If a young 
 man who has reached the age of twenty- 
 five or thirty has gotten the drink habit 
 really fixed upon him, unless by supreme 
 effort of will and the help of divine grace 
 he faces about, he is on his way to wreck 
 and ruin as fast as the laws of moral 
 deterioration can carry him. She is fully 
 aware of the fact that he drinks. Every- 
 body knows that he dissipates. Parents 
 expostulate, neighbors and friends warn. 
 But she gives no heed to their repeated 
 admonitions. She is determined to marry 
 him because she says she is going to re- ■• 
 
 form him, and so another poor unfortunate 
 goes to the altar of self-sacrifice. If every 
 young man who is getting into the habit 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 115 
 
 of drinking were made aware that he 
 could not get any decent and respectable 
 young woman to pay any attention to him 
 as long as he drinks, he would quit for 
 good; and if every young woman whose 
 affection is sought with a view to matri- 
 mony by a young man who drinks, would 
 say to him, "I will have nothing to do 
 with you as long as you drink," she would 
 be doing wonders in lessening the world's 
 miseries, above all in diminishing the evils 
 that come from divorce. 
 
 The failure to live within the income is 
 still another indictment that must be laid 
 at the door of many a home where mar- 
 ried life has been a failure. The woman 
 fool in this case suggests and urges the 
 purchase of some single expensive piece of 
 furniture on the installment plan. This 
 beautiful addition to the home furnishings 
 makes many other things look shabby, 
 which are soon replaced with other articles 
 to correspond with that first costly pur- 
 chase. So the debt is piled up until it 
 gets entirely beyond reach. Receiving 
 twelve hundred dollars a year and spending 
 
116 SIX FOOLS 
 
 twelve hundred and fifty will soon bring 
 a shadow over any home that follows that 
 system of bookkeeping. It means always 
 inability to meet obligations, dodging irate 
 creditors, the loss of manliness and self- 
 respect, and in many instances it has meant 
 bankruptcy, dishonesty, crime, and a State's 
 prison sentence. Better far a humble 
 home in a one-story cottage on the plainest 
 fare, all paid for, than life in a fine house 
 splendidly furnished and supported by an 
 outlay that fills life with unending per- 
 plexities and ceaseless burdens. 
 
 All too often we see the woman fool 
 figuring in the divorce court. She had 
 been brought up as one of the butterflies 
 of society, pampered, petted, indulged with- 
 out limit and hopelessly spoiled. She has 
 a pretty face and a fine figure, but is 
 inordinately vain. All her spare time is 
 given to a study of the fashion plates, and 
 to appear like them is her sole aim and 
 desire. After a half dozen different engage- 
 ments, which are made and broken so 
 rapidly that she is scarcely able to keep 
 track of them, she marries a good, honest 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 117 
 
 fellow, who finds himself utterly unable 
 to gratify her extravagant tastes. After a 
 few months of this union she wishes to 
 secure a legal separation in order that she 
 may marry some other man who will have 
 the means with which to meet all her 
 requirements. Her reasons for desiring the 
 divorce are so trivial and frivolous that she 
 cannot secure the necessary papers within 
 the commonwealth where she lives, so she 
 removes for a time to a State in which 
 she can find a divorce law and a judge 
 that are both broad enough to cover her 
 case. Family instability is the most star- 
 tling fact in American social life, and it is 
 increasing at a rate that is unequaled in 
 any other Christian nation. Statistics show 
 that in this land one marriage in every ten 
 ends in legal separation in the divorce 
 court. One hundred years more of the 
 same rapid increase of this social disease 
 as has characterized the last twenty years 
 and the nature of marriage will become 
 completely transformed. If the present 
 rate of increase of divorce continues un- 
 checked, at the dawn of the twenty-first 
 
118 SIX FOOLS 
 
 century many more marriages will termi- 
 nate in this country by divorce than by 
 death. A century is a long time in so 
 young a nation as ours. But it is a much 
 shorter period than the time it took for 
 Rome to degenerate from the condition in 
 which divorce was almost unknown to that 
 in which divorces were so common that 
 the sneer was repeatedly uttered that 
 women no longer reckoned time by the 
 calendar, by the number of consuls, who 
 were elected every year, but by the number 
 of their different husbands. Many a woman 
 fool regards marriage as a contract, that 
 is to be kept only so long as her husband 
 continues to be perfectly agreeable to her 
 and gives her an allowance that is suflBcient 
 to meet all her demands. WTiat a travesty 
 such a misinterpretation of the marriage 
 obligation is upon the sacredness of that 
 mutual relation into which two persons 
 enter, when they take each other for better, 
 for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness 
 and in health, as long as life shall last, where 
 love is the keynote and where trust, for- 
 giveness, and helpfulness are the ever-ready 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 119 
 
 messengers to heal bruises and to reconcile 
 all differences. If marriage is to degenerate 
 into simply a contract between two persons, 
 voidable upon every difference of whim or 
 sentiment, where is the union that would 
 endure? What would become of all the 
 finer instincts of humanity which we gain 
 from bearing and forbearing with each 
 other's weaknesses? 
 
 When God said, "It is not good that 
 man should be alone," it was woman that 
 he gave to him to be his companion. 
 Whether marriage is to make or to mar 
 a man depends so entirely upon the kind 
 of a choice which he makes that he needs 
 all the guidance that he can get. A rash 
 step may mean the blighting of his whole 
 life. But it is by no means necessary on 
 that account to be so cautious as to dis- 
 card the thought of matrimony altogether. 
 A union that is not altogether ideal in its 
 character is infinitely better for any young 
 man than no marriage at all. 
 
 Many a present-day home is happy 
 through the union of many a modern Ruth 
 and Boaz. A great multitude of twentieth- 
 
120 SIX FOOLS 
 
 century Marys and Marthas are earnest 
 and devoted followers of Christ. Any un- 
 married young man in the matrimonial 
 field is far more apt to get a Mary or 
 Martha than he is to get a Jezebel, because 
 the former class far outnumber the latter. 
 
 Many a woman wise in counsel, clear 
 in judgment, and possessed of that most 
 uncommon of common things, common 
 sense, who has never studied in a college, 
 makes a most helpful life companion. To 
 be the queen of a home it is not necessary 
 that a woman should be a college graduate 
 and able to talk different languages. Some 
 women, when the occasion requires it, can 
 talk more in one language than their hus- 
 bands care to hear. 
 
 Aristocratic family connections are not 
 necessary to make a happy home. John 
 B. Gough used to say that families who 
 boast of their ancestry are like hills of 
 potatoes — the best part of them are under 
 ground. Wealth is not needed to make a 
 little home cozy and comfortable. A few 
 tasteful and inexpensive rugs, not from 
 Persian looms but of American manufac- 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 121 
 
 ture, some pictures, some easy chairs, some 
 books, papers, and magazines, and some 
 kind of a musical instrument — these are 
 within the reach of all; and these are suffi- 
 cient in deft hands for making a home an 
 earthly paradise. 
 
 In some lands unillumined by the light 
 of a Christian civilization a man wins his 
 wife by his skill in the use of spear and 
 club, by his prowess as a warrior. In some 
 of the heathen countries wives are bought 
 like cattle in the market. 
 
 In other pagan nations the arrangements 
 for marriage are carried on entirely by the 
 parents, the young people often never meet- 
 ing one another until they are brought 
 together as husband and wife. Mutual 
 tastes and adaptability are not in any way 
 considered, love is an entirely unknown 
 factor, and the woman is from the outset 
 the abject slave of the man to whom she 
 is joined. 
 
 In Christian lands marriage is a joint 
 contract, based supposedly upon a mutual 
 love, in which the contracting parties 
 pledge theraselves the one to the other 
 
122 SIX FOOLS 
 
 to "love, comfort, honor, and keep, in 
 sickness and in health, until death do them 
 part." All this means a continuous unity 
 of purpose, a loving reciprocity of thought 
 and feeling, and a generous yielding of the 
 one to the other in everything that per- 
 tains to the highest interests of the family 
 life. 
 
 If not a state secret, it is surely a secret 
 of the matrimonial state that a man does 
 not mind being managed, provided the fact 
 of the management is not rubbed in too 
 often; and if he can only make himself 
 think and believe that he is not being man- 
 aged at all, his joy will be complete. Right 
 here is where a woman's tact comes in. 
 One of the most stubborn creatures on 
 the face of this earth is a woman-driven 
 man; and one of the meekest and most 
 docile of subjects is that same man, woman- 
 led, provided he does not know it. 
 
 How much more tactful a woman usually 
 is than a man in the management of the 
 children in the home circle ! Francis Henry, 
 aged ten, is told that he must not go 
 skating. But he goes just the same, and 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 123 
 
 he comes home at night with unmistakable 
 evidence of having been not only on the 
 ice, but through it. The father comes 
 down upon him, metaphorically speaking, 
 like a pile driver. He does not reason 
 with the boy. He punishes the lad and 
 makes him angry, and the youngster goes 
 out mad, slamming the door behind him. 
 The punishment has not been reformatory, 
 because it has awakened only the feeling 
 of resentment. Then his mother takes 
 Francis Henry on her lap to tell him how 
 much they love him; how sorry they would 
 have been if he had been drowned, and 
 how lonely the house would have been 
 without him. The little chap promises her, 
 with tears running down his cheeks, that 
 he will be obedient in the future. Through 
 this interview with his mother he has 
 received a lasting impression for good. 
 
 Who can measure the power of a Christian 
 mother in molding the characters of her 
 children for righteousness and in giving 
 them broader visions of life? 
 
 John Wesley after he had entered Ox- 
 ford University through frequent inter- 
 
124 
 
 SIX FOOLS 
 
 change of letters still kept in closest touch 
 with his mother. The mother yonder in 
 the Epworth rectory, burdened as she was 
 with the many household cares and duties, 
 still continued to wield the strongest possi- 
 ble influence over her son at Oxford. He 
 wrote long letters to his mother, telling 
 her all about his doubts of the head and 
 the heart, all about his theological diffi- 
 culties; and most amazing it is that this 
 woman, who never had had any theo- 
 logical education or training, in her replies 
 to the questions of this young Oxford 
 student, went to the very heart of the 
 difficulty. She produced answers that were 
 remarkably clear and at the same time 
 wonderfully full of common sense. No 
 finer correspondence has ever been given 
 to the world than these published letters 
 that passed between John Wesley and his 
 mother while he was a student at Oxford. 
 
 Many a man immersed in business cares 
 or in professional work has owed a large 
 measure of his success to the keen insight 
 of his wife. In the crucial tests of life it 
 has often been found that what she knows 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 125 
 
 by intuition is of greater value than all 
 his accumulated stores of wisdom and 
 experience. Because she excels in intuition 
 she frequently arrives at correct conclu- 
 sions in a flash, while he reaches the same 
 deductions much later because he travels 
 on the lumbering stagecoach of logical 
 processes. When great men depart, and 
 the world comes to learn more intimately 
 their personal histories, it is ofttimes found 
 that the very source and mainspring of 
 their lives have been the sympathy and 
 help of their wives. 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne never would have 
 succeeded as he did without his wife. It 
 was her faith in his latent powers, her 
 sympathy and encouragement, that made 
 him one of the great masters in our lit- 
 erature. Whenever he was congratulated 
 upon the astonishing success of his book 
 The Scarlet Letter, he used to point to 
 his wife and say, "The credit all belongs 
 to her." 
 
 One high in authority says that the word 
 "wife" is derived from a word meaning 
 to weave, so that the wife was and is the 
 
126 SIX FOOLS 
 
 weaver of the household. In the earlier 
 days much of the clothing was made at 
 home. The wool after it was gathered 
 was spun into the threads by the young 
 unmarried girls of the family, who were 
 called the spinners, from which we have 
 the word ''spinster," a word which is now 
 applied to any unmarried woman. The 
 threads were then taken and woven into 
 cloth by the mother of the girls, and 
 hence she became the weaver, or the wife. 
 Herein is a suggestion of the domestic 
 qualities that should characterize a wife's 
 life. Since the home is peculiarly and 
 especially the domain of the wife, it fol- 
 lows that she should be much within the 
 home. It makes little difference whether 
 that home be a four-room flat or a four- 
 story mansion, it is the place where the 
 wife should gather up and weave together 
 all the threads that enter into the warp 
 and woof of domestic life and happiness. 
 Dickens, in his Bleak House, has pictured 
 that type of the woman fool in Mrs. 
 Jellyby, who is so greatly interested in 
 outside philanthropic work that she cares 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 127 
 
 nothing for the interests of her home. 
 Missions in Borrioboola-Gha claim all atten- 
 tion, while the welfare of her children is 
 utterly ignored and household affairs go to 
 wreck and ruin. In all the larger problems 
 of the home life the husband should share 
 with his wife the responsibility for the 
 proper rearing of the children. But it is 
 neither just nor equitable that he should 
 have the domestic duties of the home 
 added to those of his shop or store or 
 office. Much is being said in these times 
 with regard to the "divided responsibility 
 of the home." While it is all fair enough 
 that there should be a certain dividing of 
 the responsibility, when it comes to the 
 conduct of the home and the rearing of 
 the children there are certain responsibil- 
 ities that the wife and mother should be 
 able to assume without shifting them upon 
 the shoulders of the husband and father. 
 A vast deal of domestic unhappiness and 
 much estrangement between husbands and 
 wives have been owing to the way in which 
 the wife was either unprepared or unwilling 
 to meet what was evidently her rightful 
 
128 SIX FOOLS 
 
 share of the simplest duties of the house- 
 hold care and management. The restora- 
 tion of true marriage would do more than 
 any other one thing in bringing in the 
 restoration of domestic happiness. True 
 marriage is a union in which the two are 
 so united that each cherishes for the other 
 a stronger attachment than for any other 
 human being; it is a union in which each 
 shares with the whole heart in the other's 
 weal or woe; it is a union which implies 
 a unity of will and purpose in the work 
 of life. Woman came into the world as 
 the complement of man, and bringing that 
 which man did not possess. He has his 
 place while she has hers, and the two 
 places are not interchangeable. Each has 
 what the other has not, and each com- 
 pletes the other. They are in nothing alike, 
 and the happiness and perfection of both 
 depend upon each asking and receiving 
 from the other what the other only can 
 give. Woman helps man by inspiring him 
 constantly to great achievement, by the 
 confidence which she breathes into him, 
 and by the sympathy which she gives to 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 129 
 
 him. She helps him not so much by what 
 she does herself as by what she inspires 
 him to do. One of the great needs of our 
 times is cultured, highly trained women in 
 our homes. Women can have no nobler 
 ambition than that of making a perfect 
 home. Who that has read Dickens's David 
 Copperfield does not recall those frequent 
 conversations between David and his fool 
 wife, in which he tries in vain to give her 
 instruction in some of the simplest things 
 in household management? Not a few men 
 are married to women who not only have 
 never learned to keep house but who have 
 not the least desire to learn how. The 
 only resort for such people is to find refuge 
 in that asylum for domestic incapables and 
 defectives — the boarding house. Mothers 
 in good health who spend their lives in 
 hotels and boarding houses to escape the 
 responsibilities of housekeeping, and who 
 allow their daughters to grow up in ignor- 
 ance of the various branches of domestic 
 science, stand out among the most con- 
 spicuous fools of modern society. Girls 
 whose training in household duties has been 
 
130 SIX FOOLS 
 
 neglected are very apt after their marriage 
 to flee to hotels or boarding houses in 
 order that they may escape the legitimate 
 penalties that come from such neglect. 
 Every self-respecting woman should regard 
 it as a most essential part of her education 
 to know how to prepare and cook foods, for 
 the food that we eat contains within it 
 comeliness or deformity, health or disease, 
 life or death. Bad cooking is frequently the 
 unsuspected cause of intemperate habits, 
 of shattered nerves, and many an aching 
 heart, the insidious destroyer of many a 
 home, inciting domestic discord, which re- 
 sults in divorce. We welcome the new day 
 that has dawned upon us when instruction 
 is now given in many of our universities, 
 colleges, and high schools in domestic 
 science. We find provided in some of 
 our most prominent institutions a four-year 
 college course leading to the degree of 
 Bachelor of Science in Home Economics, 
 the entrance requirement to which is grad- 
 uation from an accredited high school. 
 The young women who are graduated in 
 this course are fitted to become teachers of 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 131 
 
 domestic science and domestic art in high 
 schools, to act as dietitians in hospitals, 
 to do special work in food laboratories, not 
 to say anything of the splendid equipment 
 which they have for going into homes of 
 their own as wives and mothers and home- 
 makers. No girl should ever graduate in 
 any high school without taking at least a 
 portion of the course in domestic science. 
 Surely, it is worth while for a girl to know 
 something about the chemistry of foods, 
 about their relative nutritive value, and 
 about the best methods of cooking. It is 
 to a girl's profit to know that lower-priced 
 foods often contain just as much and even 
 more nutrition than those higher priced, 
 and that they can be made fully as appe- 
 tizing for the table. It is to a girl's ad- 
 vantage when she goes into a clothing 
 or dry goods store by feeling of the 
 textile fabrics and by looking at them to 
 be able to tell whether they are wool or 
 shoddy, and if they are part wool and 
 part cotton to be able to tell about what 
 proportion of wool and cotton is in them. 
 It is to a girl's benefit to know how to 
 
132 SIX FOOLS 
 
 cut out and to fit dresses, although she may 
 never be called upon to make her own 
 clothes; to know how to select her clothing 
 material so that it shall properly blend 
 together and shall harmonize with herself; 
 to know how to fit up and to furnish a 
 house so that when the task is completed 
 the mural decorations, the rugs and other 
 furnishings shall not be so out of color 
 scheme that they will seem to be dis- 
 cordant factions in everlasting warfare. 
 All this knowledge now available for girls 
 in high schools, that teach domestic sci- 
 ence, will be of inestimable value to them 
 in after life. 
 
 While Jezebel stands as the extreme of 
 wickedness among the women of the Bible, 
 we have the highest and noblest types of 
 womanhood as represented in Sarah, Ra- 
 chel, Ruth, Hannah, Mary, and Priscilla. 
 In all the pictures of Ruth that have been 
 given to the world every artist's ideal has 
 been as exquisitely featured as his skill 
 could make it. But where has any Bible 
 writer affirmed that Ruth was physically 
 beautiful.^ The Word of inspiration says 
 
 I 
 a 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 133 
 
 of Sarah and Rebecca that they were 
 "exceedingly fair." But we are nowhere 
 told that Ruth had lovely features, a beau- 
 tiful complexion, softly beaming eyes, or a 
 graceful figure; yet these are all ascribed 
 to her in all the portraits that hang in the 
 world's art galleries. In literature this 
 young widow stands as the very imper- 
 sonation of the most charming type of 
 physical womanhood; yet throughout her 
 entire biography in the book that bears 
 her name in the Bible there is not the 
 slightest allusion to her personal appear- 
 ance. Why, then, has the world proclaimed 
 her as beautiful .^^ It is because of the 
 exceeding beauty of her character, her 
 kindness of heart, magnanimity of spirit, 
 tranquillity of soul under trial, and the in- 
 tensity of her affection for her friends, 
 that the world has pronounced her lovely, 
 without ever having raised the question as 
 to what may be really learned about her 
 looks. 
 
 So it is always. The highest type of 
 beauty is never merely physical. It is 
 the outgleaming of internal virtues, the 
 
134 SIX FOOLS 
 
 golden fruit that ripens from the sweet 
 graces of character. 
 
 The soul is better than its frame. 
 The spirit than its temple. 
 
 Where these moral and intellectual qual- 
 ities exist in a woman's character they 
 give such a glowing radiance to her life, 
 such expressiveness to her face, that what- 
 ever her physical appearance, she will be 
 lovely in the eyes of all, and most beau- 
 tiful to those who know her best. She 
 has what will make her most attractive, 
 when the brightness of her eye has been 
 dimmed with sorrows, when the roses have 
 faded from her cheeks, when the symmetry 
 of her figure has gone. Real beauty, the 
 kind of beauty that lasts, must always 
 have back of it the reserve force of a 
 generous heart and a noble soul. 
 
 In the study of the philosophy of his- 
 tory it will be seen that with the coming 
 of every great crisis God has raised up a 
 man equal to the emergency. What is 
 true of man is equally true of woman. 
 Woman may not have been so conspicuous 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 135 
 
 a figure, but she has been none the less 
 important. 
 
 In the days of good King Josiah, when 
 the book of the law was found, the king 
 did not consult with Jeremiah, who was 
 then at the height of his fame, but he 
 submitted the matter to Huldah, the 
 prophetess, to procure an authoritative 
 opinion upon it. 
 
 WTien Samuel's mother consecrated her 
 boy to the service of the Lord, she had 
 no small part in determining the destiny 
 of Israel. 
 
 When the mother and grandmother of 
 young Timothy instructed him in the 
 Scriptures, they were factors in the estab- 
 lishment of the apostolic church. 
 
 In the life of the apostle Paul, when it 
 was necessary that Apollos should be 
 trained wisely for the ministry, that he 
 should be taught the way of the Lord 
 more perfectly, Paul did not hesitate to 
 give him over to the supervision of a 
 woman as well as a man, so that husband 
 and wife joined together in assisting the 
 young preacher in getting higher and 
 
136 SIX FOOLS 
 
 broader conceptions of the religion that 
 he had been set apart to proclaim among 
 men. Priscilla understood theology so 
 much better than Apollos that after she 
 had heard this brilliant young Alexandrian 
 preacher she took him and "expounded 
 unto him the way of God more perfectly." 
 
 The four daughters of Philip the evan- 
 gelist were public teachers of divine truth. 
 
 Paul speaks of Phoebe as the deaconess 
 of the church at Cenchrea, and commends 
 her most highly for the noble work that 
 she accomplished. 
 
 A number of the early church fathers, 
 among whom Tertullian, Basil, and Chrys- 
 ostom are most conspicuous, have written 
 of these deaconesses and of their work. 
 They were set apart by appropriate reli- 
 gious ceremonies to look after the sick, to 
 minister to imprisoned Christians, to do 
 pastoral work, and to teach the catechism 
 to baptized children. 
 
 The General Conference of the Method- 
 ist Episcopal Church thus has not only 
 the clear scriptural authority, but the 
 recognized custom of the apostolic church, 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 137 
 
 in setting apart the order of deaconesses 
 for the work which they are so grandly 
 doing in that denomination to-day. 
 
 A large number of the churches of 
 Protestantism would die if it were not 
 for the noble women, who form the greater 
 part of the congregations, sustain the 
 prayer meetings, and bear the spiritual 
 burdens. At a meeting of the Presbyterian 
 General Assembly a few years ago, when 
 the report on missions was read, announcing 
 a large sum that had been received from 
 men's estates through legacies, and another 
 big amount was made known that had 
 come from the Woman's Board of Mis- 
 sions, some one at once moved to "extend 
 a vote of thanks to the dead men and the 
 live women of the Presbyterian Church." 
 The phrase "dead men and live women" 
 would well describe the spiritual life of 
 many churches at the present time. 
 
 So much is still being said about the 
 natural feminine limitations that it seems 
 to be necessary in some benighted local- 
 ities to take up the argument that all 
 women are not born natural fools. Our 
 
138 SIX FOOLS 
 
 times are yet in part mediaeval in that 
 woman is still seeking to secure equal 
 wages with man, when she has shown her 
 ability to do a given work as well as man, 
 and in that there are withheld from her 
 equal rights of suffrage because she is such 
 an inferior being to man. 
 
 All who attended the World's Fair 
 in Chicago and visited the magnificent 
 Woman's Building, the entire plans and 
 specifications for which were drawn by 
 a woman architect, Sophia G. Hayden of 
 Boston, and who beheld that building 
 filled as it was with the inventions, the 
 works, and the achievements of women, all 
 the wonderful products of woman's fertile 
 brain, could not doubt her ability to fill 
 the highest positions of honor and trust. 
 
 The breadth of woman's influence is 
 constantly widening, and the field of her 
 activity is continually enlarging. Woman 
 is the strongest social force of to-day. 
 Life is her keyboard, and she may sweep 
 it with a master's touch if she will. 
 
 The pledge of woman's right to an equal 
 place with man in the world's workshop 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 139 
 
 has been in Christianity from the begin- 
 ning. It was abiding in the teachings of 
 Jesus as well as in the whole spirit and 
 philosophy of the New Testament through 
 all the dreary years of the bondage of the 
 Dark Ages. Christ treated women just as 
 kindly and courteously as he did men, 
 and in his conduct toward women he was 
 immensely superior to his own age. The 
 Jewish rabbis had a saying: "Let no man 
 talk with a woman in the street; no, not 
 even with his wife." But when the woman 
 of Samaria came to Jacob's Well to draw 
 water and found Christ resting there be- 
 side it, he entered into a memorable con- 
 versation with her as simply and as 
 naturally as if she had been a man. When 
 his disciples came back they were greatly 
 astonished and marveled among themselves 
 that he would condescend to talk thus 
 intimately with a woman. Christ, through 
 his attitude toward women, said at all 
 times, '* Women are our equals and our 
 sisters." The gradual unfolding of this 
 principle of the right of woman to an 
 equal place with man belonged to ''the 
 
140 SIX FOOLS 
 
 greater things" that Christ declared were 
 yet to come, when he ascended from OHvet. 
 
 All doors are open to the woman of 
 to-day. The only limitation is the limita- 
 tion of individual capacity. 
 
 Consider the foolish theory, that prevails 
 in some quarters, that the only business 
 of woman in life is marriage, and that the 
 only training she needs is for matrimony. 
 Most people have a general, vague con- 
 ception that more girls are born into the 
 world than boys. But this is not true, 
 for statistics show that the birth rate of 
 boys is in excess of that of girls. Accord- 
 ing to a most reliable authority, statistics 
 that have been taken from the great 
 centers of population as far back as the 
 days of Guizot and Buckle, and for at 
 least seventy-five years in our own Amer- 
 ican cities, show that there are born into 
 the world one hundred and six boys to 
 every one hundred girls. Yet there are 
 many more women than men in the world 
 for reasons that must be patent to all. 
 Wars have swept away myriads of men, 
 have desolated the world always, and will 
 
 I 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 141 
 
 continue to do so for years to come. 
 Drunkenness is peculiarly the vice of men, 
 and, of course, destroys many more men 
 than women. Men everywhere engage in 
 the dangerous and extra-hazardous occupa- 
 tions, which are attended by a much 
 larger percentage of fatalities than those 
 in which working women engage. All 
 this causes the depreciation in the number 
 of men, so that in Europe there is not a 
 single nation that does not have in it more 
 women than men. Since the women so 
 far outnumber the men, the theory is 
 neither rational nor tenable that a woman 
 must be married to be useful to society. 
 We may find in the records of state and 
 church, of benevolent societies and of 
 institutions of learning the names of some 
 of the greatest women that have ever 
 lived who have never married. What a 
 noble volume could be written, narrating 
 the magnificent achievements of some of 
 the grand old maids of history! — Miriam, 
 Queen Elizabeth, Florence Nightingale, 
 Maria Mitchell, Mary Lyon, and Frances 
 E. Willard. The world's history could 
 
142 SIX FOOLS 
 
 not be written without large mention of 
 what has been accomphshed by women 
 who have never married. Many women 
 have remained single, not because they 
 never had opportunities for marriage, but 
 because the opportunities were not of the 
 right sort. Modestly conscious of their 
 own merits, they would not give their 
 consent to be joined to those who were 
 not their equals. They have preferred to 
 make the journey through life alone rather 
 than to travel the road with the fraction 
 of a man. In short, they have preferred 
 single blessedness to double misery. So 
 it is simply talking nonsense to say that 
 the business of every woman is marriage, 
 and that the woman who does not get 
 married is a social failure. Society is 
 guilty of grave neglect in the preparation 
 of women for the future when it gives 
 them no other training than to be capable 
 wives, good mothers, and efficient house- 
 keepers. Modern training for women must 
 require far more than that. 
 
 All girls, whatever their circumstances in 
 life, should fit themselves for some definite 
 
 I 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 143 
 
 calling. This is necessary for some, and 
 surely prudential for all. Even the girl 
 who is reared in the home of luxury should 
 fit herself for making her own living. 
 She may never need to earn her own way, 
 but she should learn how to work. She 
 requires the discipline of labor, and she 
 also ought not to be deprived of the pos- 
 itive pleasure that there is in work. What 
 misery is so intolerable as that which arises 
 from ennui superinduced by idleness.^ 
 What joy is so keen as that which springs 
 from the consciousness that one is doing 
 something in the world worth while .^^ 
 
 That notion that it is degrading for a 
 young woman to engage in honest toil is 
 gone forever. The girls who make them- 
 selves independent by preparing to earn 
 their own living are the ones who really 
 deserve to be honored. They are the ones 
 for whom a safe and secure future can 
 nearly always be predicted. Our own land 
 is rapidly adjusting itself to the new 
 demands and changed requirements for 
 women. 
 
 Harriet Martineau, after her visit to 
 
144 SIX FOOLS 
 
 America in 1832, related that she found 
 but seven employments open to women: 
 teaching, needlework and keeping boarders, 
 working in cotton mills, working in book 
 binderies, type-setting, and household ser- 
 vice. According to a recent report of the 
 chief of the National Bureau of the Sta- 
 tistics of Labor there are now more than 
 four hundred remunerative occupations 
 open to women. 
 
 An unreasoning prejudice has in the past 
 often barred the way against the entrance 
 of women into the professions and occu- 
 pations which she now so highly honors. 
 
 In 1840, with the single exception of 
 Oberlin, there was not one college that 
 was open to women in the United States. 
 Now there are more than two hundred 
 universities and colleges, of all grades in 
 this land, that are open to women. The 
 first woman who was regularly graduated 
 from a medical college was Elizabeth Black- 
 well, who received the degree of Doctor 
 of Medicine from the Medical College at 
 Geneva, New York, in 1849. The faculty 
 referred the matter of her admission to 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 145 
 
 the students, who took it as a great joke 
 and voted unanimously in favor of her 
 admission to the institution. The an- 
 nouncement of the vote was received with 
 uproarious demonstrations. The faculty re- 
 luctantly accepted the decision of the 
 students, for they had expected an entirely 
 different outcome from their ballot. Dr. 
 Blackwell was compelled to go abroad for 
 her clinical study. She was received at 
 the Maternite in Paris with great difficulty, 
 and as a personal favor she was allowed 
 some privileges in the way of visiting 
 hospitals. When she returned from Europe 
 she set to work to provide opportunities 
 of clinical study for women. She estab- 
 lished, with the assistance of generous 
 friends, the New York Infirmary for women 
 and children, and from this there grew the 
 Woman's Medical College of New York. 
 
 Now women physicians are numbered 
 in the United States by the thousands. 
 They are welcomed everywhere in hos- 
 pitals, in private families, in the columns 
 of medical journals, and are invited to 
 consultations. They are successful medical 
 
146 SIX FOOLS 
 
 lecturers and are members of county, State, 
 and national medical associations. 
 
 Women are now admitted to practice 
 law before the Supreme Court of the United 
 States, who have been members of the 
 bar of the highest court of any State for 
 three years. 
 
 The Methodist, Unitarian, Universalist, 
 Disciple, and Free Baptist denominations 
 now admit women to their theological 
 schools; and all these denominations named 
 ordain women to the ministry, except the 
 Methodist. 
 
 Women have developed a capacity for 
 public affairs which receives large recog- 
 nition at the present time. Among many 
 other employments now open to them they 
 are elected or appointed to such offices as 
 county clerk, register of deeds, pension 
 agent, prison commissioner. State librarian, 
 overseer of the poor, school superintend- 
 ent, and school supervisor. They serve 
 as executors and administrators of estates, 
 as trustees and guardians of property, 
 trusts, and children. They fill positions 
 as engrossing clerks of State legislatures, 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 147 
 
 as superintendents of women's State pris- 
 ons, as college presidents and professors, as 
 members of boards of State charities, 
 lunacy and correction, as police matrons 
 and postmistresses. Women are now ac- 
 countants and pharmacists, cashiers and 
 telegraphers, stenographers and typewriters, 
 dentists and bookkeepers, authors and lec- 
 turers, journalists and painters, architects 
 and sculptors. In all these positions they 
 have shown themselves to be fully as 
 capable as men. 
 
 In all occupations in which women have 
 shown themselves to be able to do the 
 work as well as men they should receive 
 equal wages. Some excellent people are 
 unnecessarily alarmed over what they term 
 the danger which threatens our American 
 women on account of their admission into 
 nearly all lines of business and professional 
 work. Some women are silly and want 
 to be mannish, just as some men are fools 
 and want to be dudes. But to the average 
 man education, freedom to do and to dare, 
 and the sense of responsibility make him 
 only a manlier man; and such will be the 
 
148 e SIX FOOLS 
 
 effect upon womanhood. She will become 
 more completely and wholesomely a woman 
 as she has unfettered opportunity for the 
 development of body, mind, and soul. 
 
 Another evidence that medisevalism still 
 survives in our present-day life is found 
 in the claim often made that woman should 
 be kept out of politics, because as man's 
 inferior she is not capable of understanding 
 the problems of politics. How can woman 
 be kept out of politics, when she has always 
 been in politics? Jochebed, when she con- 
 structed the tiny ark of bulrushes, making 
 it water-proof and placing her infant son 
 therein and laying it in the flags by the 
 river's brink, took part in politics. Miriam, 
 when she stood guard not far away from 
 her little brother upon the banks of the 
 Nile and secured her own mother as his 
 nurse and teacher, having him conveyed to 
 his own home, where he was instructed 
 in all the great principles of the Hebrew 
 faith, took part in politics. Thermuthis, 
 Pharaoh's daughter, when, in direct opposi- 
 tion to the edict of her own father, she 
 spared the life of the infant Moses, adopted 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 149 
 
 him into the royal household, and had him 
 trained in all the learning of the Egyptians, 
 took part in politics. Bertha, the wife of 
 King ^thelbert, when she persuaded her 
 husband to listen to the Christian mission- 
 aries that had been sent out by Gregory 
 the Great, and thus opened the way for 
 the establishment of the Christian faith 
 upon the soil of Great Britain, took part 
 in politics. Joan of Arc, when she awoke 
 the French nation into a new life and 
 aroused a spirit of burning patriotism which 
 enabled her to lead the French forces 
 most successfully against their enemies, 
 took part in politics. Jenny Geddes, when 
 she arose in the Saint Giles Church in 
 Edinburgh and started a riot by throwing 
 her stool at the head of the dean, who was 
 seeking to force the people to adopt a 
 liturgy to which they were most strongly 
 opposed, took part in politics. Elizabeth 
 Fry, when she inaugurated that mighty 
 reform movement in the sanitary condition 
 of prisoners and in the treatment of indi- 
 vidual prisoners which was felt all over 
 Europe, took part in politics. Harriet 
 
150 SIX FOOLS 
 
 Beecher Stowe, when she wrote Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin, a book which created a wave 
 of pubHc sentiment against slavery that 
 swept this land from ocean to ocean, and 
 that did more to overthrow slavery than 
 all the work of both houses of Congress 
 combined, took part in politics. Keep 
 woman out of politics? As well try to 
 keep the stars out of the sky. 
 
 Justice demands that woman should have 
 the ballot. With the ballot woman be- 
 comes more truly the helpmeet of man. 
 Taxation without representation made a 
 revolution in this country nearly a century 
 and a half ago; and yet we submit to this 
 injustice in the treatment of women with- 
 out a protest. 
 
 Napoleon asked of Madame de Stael, 
 "What makes you women meddle with 
 politics?" 
 
 ''Ah, sire," she replied, "so long as you 
 will hang us, we must ask the reason." 
 
 A woman who was asked, "Who will take 
 care of the children while you go to the 
 polls?" answered, "The same one who takes 
 care of them when I go to pay my taxes." 
 
THE WOMAN FOOL 151 
 
 No one will deny that, physically, men- 
 tally, and morally, woman deserves the 
 ballot. There are those who claim that 
 the home is the unit of society and that 
 it is large enough as woman's sphere, and 
 who contend that woman, if she has the 
 ballot, must be prepared to bear arms in 
 defense of it. 
 
 Horace Greeley was once having a dis- 
 cussion with Elizabeth Cady Stanton upon 
 the subject of woman suffrage, and he said 
 to her: "What would you do in time of war 
 if you had woman suffrage, Mrs. Stanton?" 
 
 "Just what you did during the Civil 
 War, Mr. Greeley," was the instant re- 
 joinder. *T would stay at home and urge 
 others to go and fight." 
 
 The anti-woman suffragists forget that 
 woman with the ballot may still be in the 
 home sphere, for she can still protect the 
 home by voting; and that as man's helper 
 she is able to defend the ballot. What 
 he does upon the battlefield she can do 
 among the wounded in the hospital; her 
 work in helping is fully as important as 
 man's work in fighting. 
 
152 SIX FOOLS 
 
 Every vice, every most deadly evil seems 
 to rest at last its greatest burden of sorrow 
 and of woe on woman. As we look into 
 history we find that she has been the 
 greatest sufferer. She suffers most from 
 the degradation of irreligion and infidelity, M 
 
 from the curse of drink, and from the evil 
 of social impurity, and when she becomes 
 personally depraved she sinks lower and 
 becomes more degraded than man. Yet 
 woman's intuitions are much quicker than 
 man's intuitions. Gifted with a keener 
 natural discernment, she gets more com- 
 fort out of religion and dispenses more of 
 its gentle spirit. The time is coming when, 
 standing upon the platform of equal rights 
 with man, she will be able to wield a 
 still larger influence for good. 
 
 I 
 
IV 
 THE RICH FOOL 
 
1 
 
 Thus we play the fool with the time; and the 
 spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us. 
 — Shakespeare. 
 
 Though we travel the world over to find the 
 beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it 
 not. — Emerson. 
 
 If a man empties his purse into his head, no 
 one can take it from him. An investment in 
 knowledge pays the best interest. — Franklin. 
 
IV 
 
 THE RICH FOOL 
 
 Christ reenforces the lesson of steward- 
 ship so clearly taught in the Old Testament, 
 and brings it to a focus in his parable of 
 the foolish rich man. Far from regarding 
 himself as a steward of the manifold grace 
 of God, this man completely ignored his 
 responsibility to the Father Almighty in 
 the matter of his possessions. He speaks 
 of "my fruits" and "my goods," and is 
 described by Christ as laying up treasure 
 for himself, looking upon all the increase 
 of his fields as exclusively his own. Feel- 
 ing the need of larger accommodations for 
 the rich yield from his land, and determin- 
 ing to pull down his barns and build 
 greater, he looked forward to this desired 
 end as if it had already been accomplished, 
 and rejoiced in anticipation over the good 
 time that he would have. But the decree 
 came forth from the Eternal at the very 
 
 155 
 
156 SIX FOOLS 
 
 time when he was gleefully calculating on 
 this future enjoyment: "Thou fool, this 
 night thy soul shall be required of thee. 
 Then whose shall those things be, which 
 thou hast provided?" That is the simple 
 story as Christ gives it, and this is the 
 moral which he adds to it: "So," that is 
 such a fool, so great a fool, "is he that 
 layeth up treasure for himself and is not 
 rich toward God." 
 
 If the scriptural doctrine of stewardship 
 were universally acted upon by those who 
 are possessed of property, the theory of 
 communism would cease to exist. The com- 
 munist says to the capitalist: "You have 
 no right to hold your property. It is not 
 yours. It belongs to me and to others. 
 It should be divided up, and we should all 
 share alike. If you do not divide your 
 property, I will come and take it by force." 
 That is robbery. But the Christian says: 
 "My property belongs to God. I am God's 
 steward. He has given me my property 
 to use for him, and I will use it under his 
 direction for the good of others." That is 
 stewardship. We would find in this right- 
 
THE RICH FOOL 157 
 
 ful exercise of Christian stewardship the 
 antidote for many of the troubles that 
 are agitating the labor world at the present 
 time. 
 
 In this age of intense commercialism it 
 would seem that all classes are following 
 lago's advice to Roderigo — "Put money in 
 thy purse." Roderigo had fallen in love 
 with Desdemona, but the maiden had 
 chosen to bestow her affections in another 
 direction. Roderigo was passing through 
 that stage of experience, which most men 
 pass through in their youth, when he felt 
 that life was not worth living without the 
 object of his affections to share it with 
 him. The sun would shine in vain without 
 her smiles. No flower would have any 
 perfume if it could not be plucked and worn 
 upon her breast. So he went to lago in 
 his despondency, and said, 'T will incon- 
 tinently drown myself." 
 
 lago replied: "Ere I would say I would 
 drown myself for the love of a guinea-hen, 
 I would change my humanity with a 
 baboon. Come, be a man: drown thyself? 
 Drown cats and blind puppies. I profess 
 
158 SIX FOOLS 
 
 me thy friend, and I confess me knit to 
 thy deserving with cables of perdurable 
 toughness; I could never better stead thee 
 than now. Put money in thy purse; follow 
 these wars; defeat thy favor with an 
 usurped beard; I say, put money in thy 
 purse. It cannot be that Desdemona should 
 long continue her love to the Moor — ^put 
 money in thy purse — nor he his to her: 
 it was a violent commencement, and thou 
 shalt see an answerable sequestration — ^put 
 but money in thy purse. These Moors 
 are changeable in their wills — fill thy purse 
 with money. If thou wilt needs damn 
 thyself, do it in a more delicate way than 
 drowning. Make all the money thou 
 canst." 
 
 All this advice was the counsel of a false 
 friend, the admonition of a traitor to all 
 virtue and honesty, the recommendation 
 of an arch conspirator and companion in 
 treachery to Judas Iscariot. Nevertheless, 
 the advice, *Tut money in thy purse," is 
 very pertinent and of great value. No man 
 can get through this life as he ought to 
 without having some money in his purse. 
 
THE RICH FOOL 159 
 
 Money is the circulating medium of any 
 country. Its existence in some form is 
 necessary for purposes of traffic and trade. 
 It is indispensable in effecting sales and 
 making purchases. All nations, both civil- 
 ized and savage, have striven to make 
 some convenient form of currency. That 
 word "currency" is derived from the Latin 
 cur ere, "to run," which no doubt accounts 
 for the remarkable rapidity with which it 
 slips through a man's fingers. 
 
 As far back as we go in history we find 
 Abraham with his shekels, bartering with 
 silver and gold. Coins are in existence 
 more than three thousand years old, but 
 none can tell who made or stamped the 
 first coin. In ancient Sparta iron was used 
 as money. A Spartan lady, when she 
 went shopping, would have needed a slave 
 and an ox cart to carry her necessary cash. 
 Lycurgus was a wise man, and in the use 
 of his iron money was prompted by the 
 double purpose to keep the Spartans at 
 home, for that kind of money would be 
 absolutely worthless in any place outside 
 of Sparta, and to keep them from being 
 
160 SIX FOOLS 
 
 corrupted by foreign manners. In the time 
 of Numa Pompilius, the second king of 
 Rome, seven hundred years before Christ, 
 stamped leather was used, from which the 
 word pecunia is derived. From this word 
 there comes that elegant phraseology, which 
 we use when a man is hard up, and we 
 say he is exceedingly impecunious. In 
 Hindoostan, they used cowries or shells as 
 a medium of exchange. From this use of 
 shells for money there has come our com- 
 mon, everyday phrase, "to shell out." In 
 the earlier days of American history a great 
 deal of tobacco was used for money; times 
 have now so changed that a great deal 
 of money is used for tobacco. About the 
 middle of the seventeenth century the then 
 new colony of Virginia prescribed the quality 
 and the quantity of tobacco that should 
 circulate as money. 
 
 Our Puritan ancestors were very good 
 men, but they were not without their 
 human failings. This is seen in the early 
 laws that were enacted against the abuse 
 of money. It is a noteworthy fact that 
 every silver coin has a raised ring around 
 
THE RICH FOOL 161 
 
 its outer edge; but silver coins were first 
 made without these raised rings, until a 
 law was passed that they should be so 
 manufactured. Only a single generation 
 after the landing of the Pilgrims, it 
 was found necessary to pass a law pro- 
 hibiting the clipping of coin. As this 
 law proved ineffective, they put a raised 
 ring around the edge of the coin, and de- 
 clared that no coin would be valid or pass 
 current when its ring was cut away. 
 
 A certain woman confounded the New 
 England community in which she lived 
 more than two centuries ago, and after the 
 time that the law just referred to was 
 passed. Her husband kept a tollgate; and 
 although they were poor people, yet it 
 was soon noticed that his wife had secured 
 the necessary means somewhere with which 
 to purchase for herself a set of table silver. 
 The women of this Massachusetts town at 
 once set themselves to work at the arduous 
 but agreeable task of finding out where and 
 how this woman got her silver. Did any- 
 one ever yet discover a company of women 
 who were not equal to a self-imposed duty 
 
162 SIX FOOLS 
 
 of this kind? They were, of course, success- 
 ful, and they discovered that of all silver 
 coins which passed into and through the 
 hands of the gatekeeper as toll-money, 
 that although no coin was clipped upon 
 the edges, yet there was a hole in the 
 center of each coin. The keeper of the toll- 
 gate had invented a machine that punched 
 a hole in each coin. "Many a mickle 
 makes a muckle," and as they carefully 
 saved all the little pieces of silver that 
 were punched out, it was not long until 
 his wife had her silverware. So a new 
 law had to be passed in Massachusetts 
 against punching holes in coins. 
 
 Not a single word can be found in the 
 Bible against money. The Old Testament 
 says, "Money answereth all things." Our 
 Lord wrought a miracle to secure a piece 
 of money with which to pay his taxes. 
 He appointed Judas as the treasurer of 
 the band of the disciples. Judas, it is true, 
 was a type of the modern recreant Chris- 
 tian defaulter. Nevertheless, he was ap- 
 pointed to take charge of the funds with 
 the consent of our Lord. 
 
THE RICH FOOL 168 
 
 What is condemned in the Bible is the 
 love of money. It is "the love of money" 
 which **is the root of all evil." It is not 
 a sin for a man to get rich, if he can do 
 it honestly. It is not wrong for a man to 
 acquire wealth, if he spend his money wisely 
 and generously for charitable and benev- 
 olent purposes after he has gotten it 
 together. But it is the narrow, selfish, and 
 sordid aggrandizement of wealth; it is the 
 idolatrous worship of the mighty dollar 
 that came under the just condemnation of 
 Christ. 
 
 If those who give vent to fierce philip- 
 pics upon money, who indulge in indis- 
 criminate condemnation of money and all 
 money-getting, were really taken at their 
 own suggestion, they would soon reverse 
 their judgments. If men should really 
 cease to strive for money, these alarmists 
 would become at length dismayed at the 
 success of their own experiment. They 
 would hasten, after a time, to rekindle the 
 ambition for the acquisition of money. 
 The desire for the attainment of wealth 
 is one of the mighty factors in speeding 
 
164 SIX FOOLS 
 
 forward the wheels of the world's thought 
 and activities. 
 
 It was the money advanced by Queen 
 Isabella of Spain that fitted out the three 
 little ships of Columbus with which he 
 made his voyage of discovery to this 
 Western world. It was the money ad- 
 vanced by the crowned heads of Europe 
 that fitted out expedition after expedition 
 to this newly discovered continent, and 
 that enabled the leaders of these expedi- 
 tions to continue their researches and 
 explorations, until the world came to know 
 the richness and vastness of this new 
 western hemisphere. It was the seven 
 million two hundred thousand dollars in 
 gold, given by the United States in 1867, 
 that purchased from Russia our territory 
 of Alaska. The desirability of the pur- 
 chase having been strongly championed by 
 William H. Seward, then Secretary of 
 State, the papers sneeringly referred to it 
 as ''Seward's Folly" and characterized it as 
 the purchase of icebergs and sea lions. 
 The payment of such a great sum at a 
 time when, immediately following our Civil 
 
THE RICH FOOL 165 
 
 War, our national debt loomed so large 
 struck the average citizen as a piece of 
 the most stupendous folly. But we have 
 found wonderful resources in Alaska, in 
 the fishing and mining interests, and in 
 the export of seal furs, that have all been 
 developed since it became a part of our 
 national domain. That little investment 
 of ours in the Northwest is now paying 
 in its annual commerce more every year 
 than its original purchase money. "Sew- 
 ard's Folly" was one of the best bargains 
 Uncle Sam ever made. 
 
 This desire for the acquisition of wealth 
 has also been one of the mighty factors 
 in the material development of our great 
 national resources. It has brought the 
 virgin prairies under cultivation and has 
 drained our marshes, bringing new large 
 areas of richest soil under the plow and 
 the harrow. It has made millions of acres 
 of our land wave with the golden glory 
 of the abundant harvests. It has tunneled 
 our mountains and has spanned our largest 
 rivers. It has interwoven the network of 
 steel bands across the continent and has 
 
166 SIX FOOLS 
 
 dotted the seas of earth with the countless 
 sails of commerce. It has built our large 
 cities, and has caused a nation here to 
 spring into life — great, prosperous, and free. 
 It is to the best interests of all men that 
 there should be printing presses for the 
 dissemination of good literature; that there 
 should be Christian churches. Christian 
 colleges and universities, mission stations, 
 hospitals, asylums for the insane, and 
 schools for the blind, deaf, and dumb; 
 and that we should have all the mag- 
 nificent machinery of our modern Christian 
 civilization. It takes money to run all 
 these things. Man wants the freedom of 
 religion and the freedom of thought. He 
 wants all the best things that belong to 
 an advanced intellectual culture, all the 
 great ideas that books can give to him. 
 It requires money to procure all these 
 things. It is the rich man's steamships 
 that bear the missionaries over the sea to 
 the heathen. It is the rich man's rail- 
 roads that transport the servants of the 
 Lord from city to city, from village to vil- 
 lage, and from church to church, with 
 
THE RICH FOOL 167 
 
 amazing promptness and velocity. Hos- 
 pitals and homes for the aged, asylums 
 and countless charities flourish, vitalized 
 and fertilized by the gold of wealthy men 
 and women. 
 
 In view of the great good that is being 
 done in this world by those who are called 
 rich, we have no right to condemn indis- 
 criminately all wealth and all wealth- 
 getting. We have many thoroughly con- 
 secrated men and women to whom God 
 has given great wealth who regard them- 
 selves as stewards of his manifold mercies 
 to disburse the funds which they regard as 
 a sacred trust. When we look at the 
 matter of our national wealth the question 
 comes to us freighted with tremendous 
 responsibilities. It is the field of marvel- 
 ous mercantile and manufacturing estab- 
 lishments. It is the prolific source of 
 products that are at once amazing and 
 almost infinite in their variety. It is the 
 organized skill and intelligence which have 
 spelled out the secrets of nature and have 
 won her to the service of humanity. The 
 dreams of former generations seem at last 
 
168 SIX FOOLS 
 
 about to be realized. The dominion of 
 man over the forces of nature is appar- 
 ently upon the eve of being trimnphantly 
 crowned. 
 
 Such wealth as that which we possess 
 as a nation is phenomenal; and it has been 
 largely the creation of only a few decades 
 of production, while the resources of Europe 
 represent the growth of centuries. And 
 yet we are only just beginning to develop 
 our vast agricultural areas, our mines, our 
 railroad systems, our oil and gas wells, 
 and our manufacturing plants, with their 
 endless variety in machinery and product. 
 
 Wealth has great malevolent as well as 
 benevolent possibilities. It can stand in 
 the pathway of the municipal and the 
 civil good. It can be used to corrupt 
 juries and lawyers and to bribe lawmakers. 
 It can pervert local and national legis- 
 lation, buy votes, debauch the community 
 and corporation conscience, and make men 
 grossly material in their daily lives. 
 
 We behold to-day the vast concentra- 
 tion of wealth in the hands of the com- 
 paratively few, and the still vaster con- 
 
THE RICH FOOL 169 
 
 centration of production and transportation 
 in the hands of powerful syndicates. We 
 have the bilHon-dollar trust now, and other 
 mergers and combines that are almost as 
 large. The multimillionaire of to-day bids 
 fair soon to be surpassed by the billionaire 
 of to-morrow. This concentration, this 
 organization of capital on the one side is 
 driving labor to such a completeness of 
 organization as the world has never known 
 before. We find in these days of social 
 unrest that a cheap and perishing notoriety 
 can easily be gained by a leader who in 
 times of conflict between capital and labor 
 loudly champions the cause of belligerent 
 labor unions and striking rioters. But all 
 these debated questions belong to the 
 calmer judgment of our republic as a whole, 
 and they should be settled, not in the 
 interests of one section, but in the interests 
 of the entire country. We may freely 
 grant that under the craze of a fierce 
 commercial competition capital may have 
 bought men body and soul; but even then 
 labor has no right to stride forward to 
 the throne of dominion, over the prostrate 
 
170 SIX FOOLS 
 
 forms of workingmen who have been 
 maimed or killed for working in opposi- 
 tion to the orders of labor unions. 
 
 All money-getting should be regarded 
 only as a means to the attainment of the 
 highest and noblest ends of life. A man's 
 real worth is his soul- worth. But in the 
 life of our times the mind is not always 
 made the measure of the man. Real 
 worth and soul -worth are not always ac- 
 cepted as synonyms. In market listings 
 moral values are often subjected to heavy 
 discounts. When anyone comes up for 
 discussion in business or social circles the 
 most of people ask, "How much is he 
 worth?" What do they mean by that 
 question? Do they mean how many broad 
 fields of the mind's possession? Do they 
 mean how many bonded securities have 
 been laid away in the bank of the soul 
 for the world that is to come? Do they 
 mean how many splendid treasures of a 
 noble character have been accumulated as 
 reserve fund for that endless future life? 
 No; not at all. They mean how much 
 is he worth in the listing that always ap- 
 
THE RICH FOOL 171 
 
 pears largest when a man takes the private 
 mental inventory of what he has, and that 
 dwindles almost to the vanishing point 
 when the appraiser comes around. How 
 much is he worth in dollars and cents, in 
 houses and lands, in stocks and bonds, 
 in gilt-edged mortgages and first-class secur- 
 ities upon real estate? 
 
 One of Chicago's multimillionaires used 
 to be heard by his servants as he tossed 
 night after night on his bed, saying, ''O 
 God! I wonder when it will be morning." 
 The next morning that man might have 
 commanded twenty millions of dollars, but 
 he was a veritable pauper in spirit. He 
 had the eyes and the feelings of a hawk, 
 and was ever ready to pounce on any- 
 thing that promised to yield back money 
 to his beak and claws. He was sagacious 
 and shrewd and cunning about money 
 matters up to the very last; but he was 
 a poverty-stricken wretch in all that peace 
 and comfort and happiness which money 
 is supposed to bring. He loved nobody, 
 and nobody loved him. He went about 
 gritting his teeth, when he remembered 
 
172 SIX FOOLS 
 
 how his heirs were cursing and swearing 
 because he lived so long. His heart was 
 a perfect desert, utterly barren in every- 
 thing that makes life worth the living. 
 
 One of our American men of wealth, 
 who was worth one hundred millions of 
 dollars, came to his death by slow starva- 
 tion. He was utterly unable to digest any 
 solid food for months before his death. 
 He gave great feasts, yet he was not able 
 to taste any of the delicacies himself. He 
 gave a lavish entertainment on his yacht 
 to some of the most noted members of 
 the English nobility only a little while 
 before he died. The banquet was spread 
 in the dining room, a room as beautiful as 
 an apartment in a king's palace. The 
 table was a mass of glittering plate and 
 exquisite china, cut glass, and rare flowers. 
 The servants were bustling about here and 
 there putting the final touches to the 
 sumptuous board, when suddenly there tot- 
 tered feebly into the room, attended by 
 his valet, the wraith of the master of all 
 this opulence and luxury. He surveyed 
 the table with his pathetic eyes, and then 
 
THE RICH FOOL 173 
 
 feebly said, "What does all this lay-out 
 amount to, when any street beggar enjoys 
 more of life than I do?" 
 
 Many a man who has gone to the far 
 West, and who has struggled to amass the 
 large fortune which he has at last ac- 
 quired, has supposed that after he has 
 gotten his wealth together he would be 
 able to buy with it perfect peace and 
 happiness. To this end he has removed 
 to some great city, built a palatial home 
 on a fashionable avenue, and has gotten 
 into society life. But he has found that 
 shall and receptions bore him, that late 
 dinners do not agree either with his head 
 or stomach, and that the sort of life which 
 he thought would contain for him such a 
 store of pleasure has in it no pleasure at all. 
 
 A certain copper king had removed to a 
 metropolitan center with all his millions 
 and found the rounds of life upon which 
 he had entered most distasteful and bur- 
 densome. He was visited in his beautiful 
 home by his old mine partner from the 
 West, who said to him, after having been 
 conducted all over his magnificent mansion: 
 
174 SIX FOOLS 
 
 "Well, Tom, you surely cannot say you 
 haven't everything that you want?" 
 
 "Yes," was the quick retort, "there is 
 one thing I haven't got that I do want. 
 I want a parrot to hang up in a cage in 
 my front hallway, that has been trained 
 to say every time he sees me enter the 
 door, 'Here comes the old fool again.'" 
 
 So when we ask the question, "What 
 is a man worth .^" we observe that there 
 is a great deal more that enters into the 
 answer to that question than the enumera- 
 tion of real estate and mortgages, of secur- 
 ities and dollars in the bank. Whenever 
 a business man dies all who have known 
 him in a business way at once set to work 
 to reckon up his profits and losses, to 
 balance his books of life, and to ask, 
 "What was the man worth?" The answer 
 comes in stocks and bonds, in houses and 
 lots, and the general public is satisfied 
 with that sort of an answer. But the 
 friends of his heart, who stand around his 
 casket, do not reckon it that way. They 
 search their memories for every kind action, 
 for every good deed, for every loving thing 
 
THE RICH FOOL 175 
 
 that they have ever known him to do. 
 They garner every noble sentiment that 
 they have heard him utter and treasure 
 every high aspiration and lofty purpose 
 that they have known him to cherish. 
 These are the riches that are regarded as 
 of the highest worth in that sad hour by 
 the friends of his heart. These riches are 
 the exponents of the soul-life. They show 
 the spiritual manhood that had been at- 
 tained, the stock of noble character that 
 had been acquired. When at such times 
 we ask, "What is a man worth .^" God 
 answers, "Man's greatest worth is in the 
 possession of a pure and noble character." 
 It has come to be among the highest 
 encomiums that can be uttered to have 
 it said at the decease of any public man, 
 when it can be honestly said of him, "He 
 died poor." Emphasis was given to this 
 fact in the tributes that were given to 
 the life and character of Senator John A. 
 Logan. One of our leading American news- 
 papers said concerning him: "During his 
 long public career his personal integrity 
 was never questioned. He never derived 
 
176 SIX FOOLS 
 
 private profit from the opportunities of 
 public place." All alike, friend and foe, 
 gave willing assent to the truthfulness of 
 that statement. That old adage, which is 
 of the highest authority, gains only in 
 luster with the passage of the years: "A 
 good name is rather to be chosen than 
 great riches." 
 
 It is often the case that more civility 
 is shown to rascality in broadcloth than to 
 a hero in rags. Currency, like charity, 
 often covers a multitude of sins. It is 
 better than oxalic acid for taking stains 
 out of character. It is the best of all 
 disinfectants for destroying disagreeable 
 odors. 
 
 In Baltimore one man said to another, 
 meeting him upon the street Monday, 
 "Why did you take that nigger into 
 your pew with you yesterday morning at 
 church .f^" 
 
 The man replied, **He is a gentleman 
 from Hayti." 
 
 *'I don't care from what place he comes, 
 he is nothing but a nigger." 
 
 "But he is a friend of mine whom I 
 
THE RICH FOOL 177 
 
 esteem very highly. I have corresponded 
 with him for several years. He is finely 
 educated, a graduate of Harvard, and spent 
 a year in travel and study abroad." 
 
 "I don't care; he is only a nigger, and 
 you had no business to bring him into 
 your pew at our church." 
 
 "But he is worth a million of dollars." 
 
 "Worth a million of dollars! You don't 
 say! Give me an introduction to him." 
 
 We have everywhere a class of men, 
 yeomen tried and true, who will not bow 
 down in servile humility before the altar of 
 the mighty dollar; who always revere gen- 
 uine soul -worth whenever they see it; who 
 always honor noble character, although they 
 may see it clad in patched garments and 
 dwelling in humble cottages; who will 
 recognize no aristocracy but that of heart 
 and brains, of moral worth and intellectual 
 power. We meet now and then with men 
 of wealth who have gotten together all 
 their riches wrongfully and fraudulently; 
 whose lives are deeply stained with open 
 sin; who have coined their money from 
 tears and blood; who have devoured wid- 
 
178 SIX FOOLS 
 
 ows' houses and are rolling to-day in their 
 ill-gotten wealth, scarcely a penny of which 
 has come to them fairly or equitably. Let 
 those who will bow down in cringing, fawn- 
 ing subservience before such idols and 
 worship such dishonestly and dishonorably 
 acquired wealth. But we still have Morde- 
 cais, who remain immoved at the king's 
 gate, despising such ill-gotten gain and 
 the man who has gotten it together. 
 
 Money cannot buy for us the capacity 
 for enjoying the best things of earth. In 
 the midst of the wealth of the universe 
 many a person is starving because he does 
 not have the power to see and to enjoj^ 
 the riches that are all around him and 
 within the reach of us all. What a vivid 
 illustration is that which George Mac- 
 donald gives of the old man and his son 
 living in the castle, which they owned and 
 which had been handed down to them 
 through many generations, yet so poor 
 that they could scarcely get the bread to 
 keep them from starving! Some of their 
 remote ancestors had stored up and con- 
 cealed within that very castle a large 
 
 i 
 
 i 
 
THE RICH FOOL 179 
 
 amount of gold and some very costly 
 jewels for the use of any of their descend- 
 ants who might be in want. Although this 
 old man and his son were right close by 
 riches that would have given to them the 
 greatest abundance, yet they were in a 
 starving condition, because they did not 
 know of their own wealth. In the midst of 
 
 Ten thousand harps attuned 
 To angelic harmonies, 
 
 men sit deaf and mute to the music of 
 daily life that is within the reach of all. 
 
 Every month in the year people go to 
 Niagara for their first visit who stand 
 gazing upon that greatest wonder of the 
 world with no more emotion stirring within 
 their souls than if they were looking at 
 some milldam nearest their own home; and 
 they spend their time while there in try- 
 ing to calculate its exact commercial value 
 if all its power could be utilized. There 
 are those who look at the western sky 
 when it is all aflame with a glow as if it 
 were some vast celestial furnace where new 
 worlds are being made, and they can see 
 
180 SIX FOOLS 
 
 in all that grandeur and glory only an 
 indication that to-morrow will be a nice 
 day without rain. There are people who 
 have no music within their souls who 
 cannot enter into the pleasures and de- 
 lights of the productions of the masters 
 because their souls have never been strung 
 to the key of those immortal symphonies. 
 
 If one actually has the love of beauty 
 enthroned within, he Tvdll see beauty every- 
 where. If one really has the love of music 
 within his soul, he will hear music everv- 
 where. Birds and trees, plants and flowers, 
 brooks and rivers will sing to him their 
 melodies. If one is possessed with the 
 keen desire to learn all the lessons that 
 nature has to teach to him, he will see 
 everywhere 
 
 books in the running brooks, 
 Sermons in stones, and good in everything. 
 
 In an intellectual sense, as well as in 
 a physical sense, we possess only as much 
 as we are able to assimilate. Therefore 
 he is the richest man who absorbs into 
 himself the most of the best in the world 
 
THE RICH FOOL 181 
 
 in which he hves, who gives the most of 
 himself out to others, and in whose posses- 
 sions others feel the richest. To be rich 
 is to have a strong and robust constitu- 
 tion; to have ''godliness with contentment, 
 which is great gain"; to have an apprecia- 
 tion of the beautiful in nature; to have 
 access to libraries containing the world's 
 best books, and to have a mind so liberally 
 stored that one is enabled to say with 
 quaint old Edward Dyer: 
 
 My mind to me a kingdom is; 
 
 Such present joys therein I find, 
 That it excels all other bliss 
 
 That earth affords or grows by kind. 
 
 Many who meet with losses of property 
 find it very difficult to discover the silver 
 linings to these dark clouds of financial 
 disaster. But the assets are still far in 
 excess of the liabilities if in the loss of all 
 earthly possessions a person still has health 
 and strength, if his family circle abide in 
 an unbroken bond of loving companionship, 
 if he still has left his business honor un- 
 tarnished and unsullied, and his conscience 
 
182 SIX FOOLS 
 
 clear in the sight of God. If he has these 
 still left to him, after the storms of financial 
 disaster have made a wreck of all his 
 worldly goods, he still has left a fortune 
 which should be regarded as having far 
 greater intrinsic value than all the regis- 
 tered bonds of the Astors and Vanderbilts. 
 A young business man of noble character, 
 who had large property holdings, but who 
 in the time of a commercial panic, after a 
 series of financial misfortunes, lost ever^^- 
 thing that he had, said to a friend, "I 
 have lost all but my wife, my two children, 
 my energy, and my good name." \Mio i 
 
 for one moment would question the fact i 
 
 that that young business man still had 
 in these priceless treasures that were yet i 
 
 left to him that which was of infinitelv ' 
 
 greater value than all the stock and the 
 entire contents of the vaults of the largest 
 and strongest bank in his own city.^ \Mio 
 would weigh gold in the balances against 
 the helpfulness, the s^^npathy, and the 
 companionship of a devoted wife, whose 
 price the wise man declares is far above 
 rubies, the heart of whose husband doth 
 
 ! 
 
THE RICH FOOL 183 
 
 safely trust in her, and whose children 
 arise up and call her blessed? Who would 
 exchange bank stock for the merry laughter 
 and the joyous prattle of the children, that 
 give light and love to the home circle? 
 Who would exchange God-given energy for 
 any kind of bonds that bind a man to a 
 life of inglorious inactivity, of utter supine- 
 ness, when it comes to making the most 
 out of himself in this life, morally and 
 intellectually? WTio would exchange his 
 good name for filthy lucre, when universal 
 experience confirms the truth that "loving 
 favor is rather to be chosen than silver 
 and gold"? There are stocks of mental 
 and moral endowment, there are gold mines 
 of love and personal power, there are bonds 
 of character that are the rightful heritage 
 of every true man and woman, for which 
 we can find no just equivalent in all the 
 combined riches of earth. 
 
 Making money just for the sake of 
 making money is not apt to make man- 
 hood. As wealth increases under such a 
 motive the soul shrivels. The fact that 
 a man has a family Bible in the house, 
 
184 SIX FOOLS 
 
 lying on the center table, does not make 
 him a Christian any more than having a 
 sword hanging on the wall above the open 
 fire place makes a man a soldier. What 
 we are makes us much richer than what 
 we have. Character is above all ma- 
 terial possessions. He who has nothing 
 but money is a pauper. As Emerson says, 
 "Without a rich heart wealth is an ugly 
 beggar." It is a sad thing to see an old 
 man begging bread. But it is sadder still 
 to see an aged millionaire tottering on 
 the verge of the grave, who has starved 
 his soul to fatten his purse, whose covet- 
 ousness and greed for gold have dried up 
 all the noblest springs of his life, and 
 stifled all his aspirations for the good, the 
 true, and the beautiful. Many who are 
 rich in the abundance of things which 
 they possess are dying from starvation of 
 the higher and better nature, whose souls 
 have become so dwarfed and atrophied 
 that the very power of exercising faith in 
 God has died out of their lives. 
 
 Christ has shown how all may make 
 themselves rich toward God by laying up 
 
THE RICH FOOL 185 
 
 treasure in heaven. Here is revealed a 
 principle that holds in hard times or good. 
 It is just the same whether the gold or 
 silver standard prevails. It is never affected 
 by political, social, or commercial revolu- 
 tions. The assurance that we have treas- 
 ures in heaven gives rest in weariness, 
 comfort in trouble, an anchor both sure 
 and steadfast in the storm, confidence in 
 perplexity, hope in despair, joy in sorrow. 
 While it is true that treasures of earth 
 can be thus laid up in heaven, yet in the 
 personal building up of a noble, Christ- 
 like character, there are laid up on earth 
 some of the very choicest treasures of 
 heaven. The only kind of riches that can 
 be taken into the other world are soul- 
 riches: honor and integrity, purity and 
 nobility, Chris tlikeness. When moving day 
 comes those who go from one house to 
 another collect all their valuables together 
 and transfer them to the other home, 
 while all the trash, that is not worth 
 taking, is gathered up and thrown out 
 as worthless refuse. When the final mov- 
 ing day comeS;, will the soul have real 
 
186 SIX FOOLS 
 
 valuables to take with it or only worthless 
 trash? Treasures can be laid up in heaven 
 by investing time and talent, consecrated 
 energy and money in the kingdom of God. 
 In seeking and securing the higher values 
 the temporal may be transformed into the 
 eternal. Money may be invested in such 
 a way that it will mold the immortal na- 
 tures of men, and be made instrumental 
 in building structures that will outlast 
 "the wrecks of matter, and the crush of 
 worlds." The plain and clear teaching of 
 the gospel is that greatness of endowment 
 carries with it corresponding greatness of 
 obligation in the line of ser\4ce. We are 
 coming slowly but surely under the sway 
 of this gospel principle. More and more 
 is the free man becoming the emancipator 
 of the enslaved. The learned man is 
 becoming more T^idely the teacher and 
 helper of the ignorant. The powerful man 
 is increasingly becoming the protector and 
 defender of the weak. The rich man, out 
 of his abundance, is becoming more largely 
 the pro^^der for the worthy poor. 
 Ashley Cooper, better known as the 
 
THE RICH FOOL 187 
 
 Earl of Shaftesbury, belonged to one of 
 the most prominent families in England 
 in wealth and social standing. From the 
 very beginning of his notable career he 
 manifested the deepest interest in the 
 welfare of the children of the poor, seek- 
 ing to help them in every way possible. 
 Frances Power Cobb once wrote him a 
 letter asking what could ever have tempted 
 him to leave the society of royalty and 
 become the knight-errant of the poor. He 
 replied that when he was a lad of ten or 
 twelve he was grieved to see that nearly 
 all the aristocratic boys with whom he 
 played looked down upon the poorer chil- 
 dren and taunted them. In his mission to 
 the poor he not only founded schools and 
 orphanages and gave large endowments for 
 securing pensions to the aged, but he gave 
 himself in service to the poverty-stricken 
 and the outcast. Instead of going out 
 to dinner or to some social function, or 
 even to his home, following a session in 
 the House of Lords that lasted until 
 midnight, he frequently went out on the 
 streets of London, and with a paid attend- 
 
188 SIX FOOLS 
 
 ant made his way to the sheltered ends of 
 the London bridges and collected the cold 
 and the hungry, the waifs and even would- 
 be-suicides and provided food and shelter 
 for them, a chance to work, and an oppor- 
 tunity for a better life. He worked in 
 this way through a long term of years, 
 for he lived to be an old man. He in- 
 vested his life in the kingdom of God, and 
 when he died there was such a funeral 
 in London as it had never seen even at 
 the death of a king. There were marching 
 thousands in the procession, and the sound 
 of weeping was heard not only in the 
 London streets but in every city in the 
 United Kingdom. More honor was shown 
 to him upon his departure than was given 
 to any of his peers, whether they were 
 famous in statesmanship, in art, or in 
 scholarship. Lord Salisbury, England's 
 Prime Minister, in speaking of him in 
 the House of Lords said: "Lord Shaftes- 
 bury goes down to his grave honored by 
 the rich and beloved by the poor. The 
 greatness of England consists not in its 
 trade and commerce, nor in its nsivy, whose 
 
THE RICH FOOL 189 
 
 battleships ride the seas, but in men hke 
 Lord Shaftesbury." 
 
 The real riches not only of England 
 but of the world consist, not in first-class 
 securities that lie in fire-proof and burglar- 
 proof vaults, not in property holdings 
 which in their productive value have be- 
 come as rich in yield as a gold mine in 
 the Klondike, but the world's real riches 
 consist in great hearts like that of Lord 
 Shaftesbury, who in response to the world's 
 hunger for love and sympathy, for com- 
 fort and help, give themselves in service 
 to others. 
 
 John Ruskin fell heir to a large patri- 
 mony, and as one of the greatest prose 
 writers of the nineteenth century, with the 
 immense income that came from his books, 
 he doubled his fortune. World-famous as 
 an author at twenty-one, court and legis- 
 lative hall, college and university united 
 in paying him reverence and homage. 
 Walking through the W^hite Chapel dis- 
 trict in East London one day, he saw 
 sights that made his heart sick. Every 
 brick that his feet touched in the pave- 
 
190 SIX FOOLS 
 
 ment oozed with filth. In all that section 
 of the city there were no parks, no verdure, 
 no flowers. The people had no reading 
 rooms, no libraries, no art galleries, no 
 healthful or helpful social centers, no means 
 of wholesome recreation, no opportunity to 
 raise themselves out of their hell of degra- 
 dation. Evil was everywhere dominant, 
 anarchy was rampant. As Paul heard in 
 the call of the man of Macedonia at Troas 
 the condensed cry of all Europe for the 
 gospel, so Ruskin in the vision that came 
 to him in East London that day heard 
 the composite call of all the submerged 
 millions of our cities for help. A pioneer 
 in social settlement work, he drew upon 
 his own large means, and founded and 
 established in that ^Miite Chapel district 
 clubs and charities, schools and museums. 
 He took thither and placed in these schools 
 and museums for the use of those people 
 many of his books and curios, and a large 
 number of his paintings and art treasures. 
 And not only this, but he went to the 
 White Chapel district himself once every 
 week and gave to those poor, degraded. 
 
THE RICH FOOL 191 
 
 woe-begone people a whole day of Christ- 
 like service, the best that there was in 
 him to give. 
 
 We are preaching in these times the 
 new evangel, a gospel for the bodies as 
 well as for the souls of men. The most 
 of religion consisted formerly in teaching 
 men how to get ready to die; now we be- 
 lieve in teaching men how to get ready to 
 live. We no longer spend our time in 
 talking and in dreaming about the celestial 
 city that is to come; we are striving with 
 all our might to make more celestial the 
 earthly cities that now are. We are think- 
 ing less about the golden streets yonder 
 and more about clean streets here; less 
 about the songs of the heavenly home and 
 more about the sanitation of the earthly 
 home; less about the open gates of pearl 
 and more about the open gates of the 
 saloon, the policy shop, and the gambling 
 hell. This sort of religion is a new kind. 
 It is unknown and unheard of in some 
 quarters, because it is personal, practical, 
 and comes down to the problems of every- 
 day living. It is a new religion to some 
 
192 SIX FOOLS 
 
 because it seeks to help people with their 
 burdens not only on Sunday but on all 
 the other six days of the week. 
 
 The power to make money is the gift 
 of God. "It is He that giveth thee power 
 to get wealth." Men often regard their 
 power to make money as peculiarly their 
 own power, never thanking God for it; its 
 domination thus sometimes leading them to 
 declare their independence of God. They 
 make money their god, while their souls 
 become as hard and metallic as the gold 
 that they worship. The influence which 
 the ability to make money gives should be 
 used for God. The money-making ability 
 implies the possession of industry, econ- 
 omy, patience, and all the other stalwart 
 and sturdy qualities of character that go 
 to make true manhood. But it should be 
 continually remembered that the possession 
 of money is not proof that a man is good 
 or great : it may be an index to his rascality. 
 When poverty is a personal asset it is no 
 indication that a man is good or great: it 
 may point with unerring finger to his im- 
 providence, his laziness, or his dishonesty. 
 
THE RICH FOOL 193 
 
 by which he has lost reputation and credit 
 and his means have vanished. But the 
 abiHty to make money honestly gives one 
 a standing which he may use for the 
 advancement of the Kingdom of God. The 
 money-maker who has formed the habit of 
 systematic giving for the upbuilding of 
 God's kingdom has the sweet satisfaction 
 of knowing that he is a worker together 
 with God in carrying out his wise plans 
 for the world's betterment. The rich man 
 who trusts ''in the living God who giveth 
 us richly all things to enjoy" should ever 
 be mindful that these gifts give to him 
 as God's steward the ability and the 
 opportunity for doing good. He may, by 
 making right use of these gifts of God, 
 become rich in wealth that will last when 
 gold and silver have ceased to be the 
 current coin. 
 
 Surely no rational Christian can read 
 the teachings of Christ in the New Testa- 
 ment upon the subject of giving, as they 
 are set forth in his Sermon on the Mount, 
 in the incident of the rich young ruler, 
 and in his parables of the foolish rich man. 
 
194 SIX FOOLS 
 
 the unrighteous steward, and the rich man 
 and Lazarus, and not be convinced that he 
 clearly teaches that we are stewards of 
 the manifold grace of God, and that all 
 our property is put into our hands to be 
 used according to the will of God. Paul, 
 in the application which he makes of the 
 principles and teachings of Christ upon 
 the subject of giving to the churches which 
 he had founded, settles upon a method of 
 giving which has in it two underlying prin- 
 ciples which are applicable to all churches 
 and to all times: systematic giving and 
 proportionate giving. Paul, in his First 
 Epistle to the Corinthians, says: "Now 
 concerning the collection. . . . Upon the 
 first day of the week let every one of you 
 lay by him in store, as God hath prospered 
 him." This means that we are to give 
 not only systematically, but that we are 
 also to give proportionately to our income. 
 We find many persons who give most un- 
 systematically and not at all in proportion 
 to their income. We find many others who 
 give systematically in that there is no 
 deviation from the fixed sum which they 
 
THE RICH FOOL 195 
 
 give year after year. Their annual income 
 has grown until it is twice, thrice, four 
 times, in some cases many times, what it 
 was when they began giving that certain 
 fixed sum, and yet they continue to give 
 just that same total amount year after 
 year and no more. That is not according 
 to either the Christian requirement or to 
 the Pauline standard. We are to give as 
 God hath prospered us. When a man 
 gives systematically he gives constantly 
 instead of occasionally and spasmodically. 
 Thus his giving becomes a real joy instead 
 of a burden, as so many make it. When 
 he increases his giving proportionately to 
 his income he gives according to his ability 
 instead of according to his inclination. 
 
V 
 
 THE KING FOOL 
 
Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may 
 play the fool nowhere but in his own house. — 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 He who reigns within himself and rules passions, 
 desires and fears, is more than King. — Milton. 
 
 Real glory springs from the conquest of our- 
 selves; and without that the conqueror is naught 
 but the veriest slave. — Thomson. 
 
THE KING FOOL 
 
 Remarkable and vivid were the con- 
 trasts in the life of David. When only 
 a humble shepherd lad he was anointed 
 as Israel's future king. As a skilled musi- 
 cian, as "a cunning player on an harp," 
 he appeared before Saul, when that mon- 
 arch was dejected and greatly depressed, 
 and as he played and sang on, **Saul was 
 refreshed and was well, and the evil spirit 
 departed from him." In Robert Brown- 
 ing's "Saul," pronounced by eminent critics 
 "A Messianic oratorio in words" and "in- 
 comparably the finest lyric in modern 
 poetry," he represents David as pitying 
 Saul's great gloom, and in the great effort 
 which he makes to overcome his despond- 
 ency, through his powerful appeals to the 
 heart of the king, he is shown as engaging 
 in an intellectual battle far more severe 
 and trying than the combat in which he 
 engaged with Goliath. 
 
 199 
 
200 SIX FOOLS 
 
 An unknown peasant youth, coming from 
 his country home to the seat of war be- 
 tween the Philistines and his own nation, 
 he in a brief period became a warrior of 
 great renown among his own people, lauded 
 and honored by thousands. Coming at 
 length to his crown and scepter, the king 
 became the sinner, the story of whose 
 sin forms one of the darkest recitals in 
 the annals of the Bible; but the sinner, 
 through the transforming power of divine 
 grace, was changed into a pattern of god- 
 liness. As the sweet singer of Israel he 
 was the greatest of the Hebrew poets. 
 As the conqueror of the hereditary foes 
 of Israel in successful battles he was pur- 
 suer. As the object of Saul's unreasoning 
 jealousy and vindictive hatred, and as an 
 exile, he was pursued. 
 
 When David was in hiding in the wilder- 
 ness of Ziph he was followed by Saul at 
 the head of three thousand men. Saul and 
 his soldiers were so wearied by their forced 
 and rapid day's march that they went at 
 once into camp. They felt themselves to 
 be so secure with such a large force as 
 
THE KING FOOL 201 
 
 compared with David's little band, that 
 they did not even establish any sentinels, 
 and were soon all lost in a deep sleep. 
 David and Abishai, thoroughly familiar 
 with every nook and corner of that part 
 of the country, in the darkness of the 
 night made their way into Saul's camp. 
 They came up to the sleeping king, and 
 could easily have slain him, Abishai en- 
 treating David's permission to kill the 
 unconscious monarch, but David sternly 
 commanded him not to do it. They took, 
 however, the king's spear and bolster, that 
 were close by the place where he lay, and 
 escaped to the surrounding heights. They 
 awakened Saul's army by their repeated 
 shouts, and David from the hilltop reasoned 
 with Saul, who was greatly touched at the 
 compassion shown by David in sparing him, 
 when he was told how his life had been 
 in jeopardy. David demanded to know 
 why he should be hunted and driven about 
 from place to place as if he were some 
 wild beast, and that Saul should tell him 
 what wrong, if any, he had committed 
 against him. He wished to ascertain what 
 
202 SIX FOOLS 
 
 evil Saul had laid at his door and what 
 he really had against him. David assured 
 him that if it was the Lord that had stirred 
 him up to this action, then he was ready 
 to repent and to make an offering therefor 
 before God. But if evil men had stirred 
 him up thus to persecute him without just 
 cause, they were an accursed lot and were 
 utterly unworthy of exercising any such 
 influence over him. He declared that as 
 to capturing him, Saul might just as well 
 try to catch a flea in the open field, or 
 attempt to hunt down a partridge in the 
 mountains, as to try to run him down and 
 hunt him out of his hiding place in such 
 a wilderness. Saul was greatly moved by 
 David's words, and for the time being he 
 saw the folly and wickedness of his actions 
 toward him. All the worthless excuses that 
 he had been making to ease his own con- 
 science for his shameful treatment of David 
 were swept away by the burning words of 
 his pleading subject as he exclaimed (and 
 for the moment he was perfectly sincere 
 in what he said), *L have sinned: return, 
 my son David: for I will no more do thee 
 
THE KING FOOL 203 
 
 harm, because my soul was precious in 
 thine eyes this day: behold, I have played 
 the fool, and have erred exceedingly." 
 
 However wise and bright and strong a 
 man may be, unrestrained sin will always 
 get him to playing the fool before he gets 
 through with life. 
 
 One of the dying martyrs of democracy 
 cried out upon the scaffold, ''O Liberty, 
 what crimes have been committed in thy 
 name!" And every man who has brought 
 dire punishment upon himself as the direct 
 result of unrestrained sin, has felt: "O 
 Liberty, what hells have been dug in thy 
 name!" That young man who said: ''I 
 want to be free. I wish to feel that I can 
 do just as I please. I shall release myself 
 from all trammels of usage and custom. 
 I shall drink whatever I please and when- 
 ever I please. I shall give free range to 
 my desires in every direction" — that young 
 man dug a hell for himself in the name of 
 liberty. That young woman who said: 
 'T have no use for these old-fashioned 
 doctrines, these antiquated notions of right 
 and wrong, these moldy and musty church 
 
204 SIX FOOLS 
 
 ideas, these worn-out conceptions of pro- 
 priety and impropriety. I am going to 
 break all these fetters, and be a law unto 
 myself. I am going to be entirely inde- 
 pendent of the social order" — that young 
 woman dug a hell for herself in the name 
 of liberty. 
 
 God's universe is a far grander govern- 
 ment, a far wiser, a far more tender and 
 gracious administration of law than any 
 human administration of law can be; and 
 it is an accepted principle of all human 
 governments that there is no liberty except 
 under the law. All great statesmen and 
 all large-minded publicists see that all real 
 liberty runs to law, and that all genuine 
 law produces genuine liberty. Whenever a 
 man begins to disobey God's law in this 
 universe he commences to drift into the 
 self-imposed restraints of a narrower life, 
 with smaller opportunities and more and 
 more slavery, until at last he finds him- 
 self by sin after sin in a prison house of 
 black despair, where his bondage is com- 
 plete. There can be no darker, no more 
 terrible hell than the ever-present con- 
 
THE KING FOOL 205 
 
 sciousness that a wicked man has that he 
 is what he is. Milton in his description 
 of Satan and his fall in Paradise Lost 
 shows that Satan's worst punishment was 
 in being what he himself was, for his own 
 confession was, "Myself am hell." A noted 
 criminal, who had served one long term in 
 the state's prison and who was behind the 
 bars for another extended sentence, said, 
 "I have made acquaintance with all sorts 
 of miseries, but my worst punishment is 
 in being what I am." 
 
 Our highest liberty comes to us when we 
 are under the control of law, and no soul 
 can ever come to its highest and best 
 estate unless it is dominated by some 
 power higher, nobler, and grander than 
 itself. The artist is never so free as when 
 he is working within the restrictions and 
 limitations of artistic law. The singer is 
 never so free as when the voice in every 
 way conforms to the laws of melody. The 
 orator is never so free as when the powers 
 of his eloquence conform to the laws of 
 logic, the laws of rhetoric, and the laws of 
 eflPective expression. So in the higher 
 
206 SIX FOOLS 
 
 realm of the moral law there is no freedom 
 for a person unless he is an obedient 
 servant of Almighty God. The only real 
 liberty in God's universe is that which 
 comes from doing God's will. 
 
 There stand out some of the thrones of 
 history that tell the pitiful, dreadful story 
 of abused liberty. Look yonder at that 
 throne in the literary world filled by Scot- 
 land's gifted poet, Robert Burns. Nature 
 had richly endowed him with intellectual 
 power of the rarest kind. But in the fair 
 name of liberty he gave unbridled license 
 to appetite and passion until, by reckless 
 dissipation, he had ruined his character 
 and had wrecked his life. Look yonder at 
 another throne in the literary world where 
 one of the noblest and richest intellects 
 this world ever produced began to reign. 
 When Byron took hold of his scepter no 
 man in the world exercised so large an 
 intellectual dominion. But he gave him- 
 self up to wild, ungovernable license, which 
 he mistook for liberty, trampling the laws 
 of God and of man down into the mire 
 of his own appetites and passions, and as 
 
THE KING FOOL 207 
 
 he drew near to the end of his wretched 
 and miserable career, he wrote: 
 
 My days are in the yellow leaf; 
 
 The flowers and fruits of love are gone; 
 The worm, the canker, and the grief 
 
 Are mine alone. 
 
 Look yonder at that throne in English 
 history upon which sat Richard III, who 
 in the fair name of liberty freed himself 
 from all righteousness and from all the 
 high ideals and the great truths of a just 
 and noble life. He found at last that his 
 greatest punishment lay in the fact that 
 he could not escape from his own wicked 
 personality, that he could not get rid of 
 himself. As he lay there like a beggar 
 in his tent, suffering all the horrors of a 
 lost soul, with all those ghostly specters 
 before him, that stood out in view as the 
 tangible realities of his own sins, he 
 cried out: 
 
 "My conscience hath a thousand several tongues. 
 And every tongue brings in a several tale, 
 And every tale condemns me for a villain." 
 
208 SIX FOOLS 
 
 Just such pictures are common in all 
 the walks of everyday life. Men and 
 women once pure and noble have gone 
 down into the mire and the clay of de- 
 based appetite and depraved passion and 
 have found the hell of the most galling 
 bondage, the most terrible suffering, when 
 they have supposed that they were in 
 pursuit of liberty. Sin will cause even men 
 of great natural and acquired ability to 
 play the fool. In native endowment Saul 
 had a bright, keen, strong intellect and 
 possessed great natural force of character. 
 His reign began auspiciously, and his career 
 might have continued clear on to the end 
 as splendidly as it began if he had not 
 chosen the way of evil. But he sinned 
 against God and man, and it was unre- 
 strained sin that put him to playing the 
 fool. When his moral decline once began 
 he went down swiftly. He turned against 
 his best friend, Samuel. He was untrue 
 to his own household. He betrayed his 
 own son Jonathan. The royal palace was 
 soon deserted. His soldiers broke out in 
 mutiny against him, and the soil was 
 
THE KING FOOL 209 
 
 stained with blood. The people mourned 
 for Saul, and the pathos of their grief was 
 that their king had not fulfilled the golden 
 prophecy of his youth. He was disobedient 
 unto the heavenly vision that God gave 
 him of what he might become. If he had 
 obeyed that vision, it would have led him 
 onward and upward to the noblest heights 
 of character achievement. But he dis- 
 obeyed that vision and was dragged down- 
 ward until his very name became a blight 
 and a curse. Saul erred exceedingly and 
 played the fool. 
 
 The queenly city of Jerusalem in her 
 palmiest days wore upon her fair brow a 
 crown of glory, which was removed through 
 her sin and disobedience. As a punishment 
 for her sins that beautiful city was over- 
 thrown, the temple was destroyed, and the 
 people were driven away into captivity. 
 It is under the image of an interrupted 
 feast that Jeremiah describes the con- 
 dition of the people, and the picture is 
 vividly drawn. In that far-away time the 
 guest of honor at any Oriental feast often 
 had a crown of flowers placed upon his 
 
210 
 
 SIX FOOLS 
 
 head. This was the figure used by the 
 prophet in describing the appearance of 
 Jerusalem during the time of her most 
 joyous festivities. But in the period of 
 her sorrowful decadence the elders are no 
 longer to be seen at the gate administering 
 the law. The young men are heard no 
 more performing on their musical instru- 
 ments. Joy has died out in the hearts of 
 the people. Sad mourners have taken the 
 place of rejoicing singers. Jeremiah la- 
 ments the change, that has come through 
 sin and disobedience: **The crown is fallen 
 from our head; woe unto us that we have 
 sinned." Men have been given the birth- 
 right of kingship. But sin makes them 
 aliens from the divine kingdom, removes 
 from their heads the crown of their king- 
 ship, pulls them down from the throne of 
 their power, and drags them into slavery. 
 
 When Benedict Arnold was living in 
 London in his old age, a certain man once 
 went to him and asked for letters of recom- 
 mendation to some prominent parties in 
 America. The aged traitor stood back, 
 stricken aghast at the very suggestion. 
 
THE KING FOOL 211 
 
 "What!" he said, most bitterly. "Ask 
 letters of recommendation from me? Have 
 you lost your reason? Do you not know 
 that every honest American would curse 
 the man who bore credentials with my 
 signature? I have bartered away my 
 birthright. My good name is gone forever." 
 Material prosperity may accompany 
 evildoing for a time. But just retribution 
 is bound to come in the end. The pre- 
 vailing superficial view of sin, which is 
 resulting in an ever-increasing laxity in 
 the observance of God's laws, should be 
 recognized as one of the chief perils of our 
 times. Sinners are being called only "the 
 creatures of unfavorable circumstances" 
 and "the victims of bad environment, over 
 which they have had no control." But 
 sane men are never "the creatures of un- 
 favorable circumstances," nor are they ever 
 "the victims of bad environment" in the 
 sense that they are not responsible for 
 their actions. No sane person who has 
 come to years of maturity is in any true 
 sense a creature of chance; but we are, 
 rather, each one of us, the sum total of 
 
212 SIX FOOLS 
 
 results that have come from causes that 
 we ourselves have set in motion. Men 
 to-day sneer at the great fact of sin. It 
 has been called "the result of the misad- 
 justment of the faculties." It has been 
 termed "an unfortunate but irresponsible 
 tendency." Our common sense should 
 teach us, entirely apart from theology, that 
 there can be no such "misadjustment of 
 the faculties" as to render men unaccount- 
 able for their conduct; and there does not 
 exist such "an unfortunate but irrespon- 
 sible tendency" as to render men not 
 responsible for their actions. The great, 
 ugly, omnipresent fact of sin cannot be 
 eliminated from the problem of human life. 
 Men are always deluding themselves with 
 the promise that they will repent before 
 they go too far; but they do not take into 
 proper consideration the terrible fact that 
 sin takes away a man's crown of self- 
 control. Men are always forgetful of the 
 fact that yielding to minor temptations 
 always paves the way to the commission 
 of greater and still greater sins. Temporary 
 consent with Satan glides at last into a 
 
THE KING FOOL 213 
 
 settled agreement. Once in the way of 
 evil, there is always a tendency toward 
 fixedness of character. Successive acts 
 weave themselves into habits, habits into 
 character, and character makes eternal 
 destiny. Where a man's choices have been 
 wandering away from the right track for 
 a time habit will at last insist upon a 
 fixed law as the rule and motive of his 
 actions. The sinful preferences that have 
 long been gratified at last will form a 
 union with the powers of darkness; and 
 the habits that have thus become estab- 
 lished will lead the soul down to perdition. 
 The stone that is laid upon the founda- 
 tion may be only a little out of plumb; but 
 that mistake, if it is continued clear up 
 the wall, will make the whole building 
 unsafe. Thus it is that a person deceives 
 himself in the matter of evil conduct. He 
 views the actions of a given day simply 
 with reference to what he has done the day 
 before; and because he can discern such 
 a little difference between those actions, 
 that he thus puts so closely together, he 
 flatters himself that there is just as little 
 
214 SIX FOOLS i 
 
 difference between his present moral stand- 
 ard and what it was three or four years 
 ago. But he forgets that his standard of 
 conduct has been gradually brought down 
 from a higher to a lower plane. His finer 
 sensibilities have been steadily blunted. 
 His moral judgment has become gradually 
 perverted, so that his conscience is now 
 far less sensitive to suggestions of right 
 and duty. He fails to remember that by 
 the aggregation of those minute mistakes, 
 those minor omissions of duty, those little 
 sins, he has already gone far away in the 
 direction of evil. 
 
 The story is told that an eagle was seen 
 to alight upon the body of a lamb frozen 
 into a cake of floating ice on Niagara 
 River three miles above the falls. While 
 devouring the flesh of the lamb that eagle's 
 claws became frozen into its fleece. WTien 
 the king of birds neared the falls, uncon- 
 scious of his bondage, he stooped and 
 spread his powerful wings and leaped to 
 flight; but in spite of a terrible struggle he 
 was held fast and went down into the 
 chasm. So the man who is indifferent to 
 
THE KING FOOL 215 
 
 the rebukes of conscience and careless of 
 the hideous results that must come from 
 sin thinks that he can at any time escape 
 to safety. But when he wishes at last to 
 free himself from the self-imposed bondage 
 which he has unconsciously made he finds 
 that his affections and desires are so en- 
 tangled in sin that he cannot escape. 
 
 Only a little error at the marksman's 
 hand becomes a wide divergence in the 
 neighborhood of the target. So a little 
 sin begun in the days of youth means a 
 great deal of deviation from the right as 
 it has gone on through the years. On a 
 couch in yonder mansion there lies a man 
 who is tossing in the critical hour of pneu- 
 monia or typhoid fever. The physician in 
 charge, after the council has been held in 
 the home with two of the greatest medical 
 specialists in the city, tells the family that 
 there is no hope. As they are leaving the 
 house the family doctor remarks to the 
 other two: "If he had lived a good life, 
 we could save him. But fast living and 
 dissipation have so undermined his consti- 
 tution that there is nothing to build on." 
 
216 SIX FOOLS 
 
 We behold a young man, of a wealthy 
 and aristocratic family, who is facing the 
 possibilities of a great career. He has a 
 circle of friends who represent the highest 
 social standing. Large opportunities are 
 beckoning to him. But he has taken his 
 college curriculum in the most superficial 
 manner possible; and in his professional 
 course he has done only enough work to 
 escape being dismissed from the institution. 
 He has gone abroad and has lived a bohe- 
 mian life at its worst. He is utterly un- 
 prepared for the large responsibilities that 
 are inviting him, and will never measure 
 up to the requirements. His sins of laziness 
 and incompetency are sure to find him 
 out. He will be compelled to reap the 
 harvest of inevitable failure that comes 
 from the sowing of his neglect. The crown 
 is fallen from his head; and woe is unto 
 him that he has sinned. 
 
 All history abounds with the sad records 
 of those who have been acknowledged 
 geniuses or endowed with great talent and 
 who have started out splendidly, but, like 
 Saul, they have made shipwreck of their 
 
THE KING FOOL 217 
 
 lives. Think of the great numbers of 
 strong, proud, and noble ships upon the 
 ocean of Hfe that have been wrecked 
 through gambHng, drink, and lust. Think 
 of the multitudes of lives that have begun 
 so well but which through sin have ended 
 as Saul's life did, in the depths of awful 
 despair. 
 
 Charles Lamb was one of the quaintest 
 and most delightful humorists in literature. 
 While all the world laughed at his winsome 
 humor, all the world was saddened at his 
 self-imposed bondage. Can there be any- 
 thing sadder than this awful cry of despair 
 that came from Lamb when he knew that 
 he was hopelessly enslaved by drink? — 
 *'The waters have gone over me. But 
 out of the depths, could I be heard, I would 
 cry out to all those who have set a foot 
 in the perilous flood. Could the youth, to 
 whom the first flavor of wine is delicious, 
 look into my desolation; could he be made 
 to understand what a dreary thing it is 
 when a man shall feel himself going down 
 a precipice with open eyes and passive will; 
 could he see his own destruction and have 
 
218 SIX FOOLS 
 
 no power to arrest it, yet could he feel it 
 all emanating from himself; could he see 
 all godliness empty out of him, yet not 
 be able to forget the time when it was 
 otherwise; could he bear about the piteous 
 spectacle of his ruin; could he see my 
 feverish eye, feverish with last night's 
 drinking, and feverishly looking for to- 
 night's repetition of that folly; could he 
 but feel the body of death, out of which 
 I cry hourly, with feeble outcr^^ to be 
 delivered, it were enough to make him 
 dash the sparkling beverage to the earth, 
 in all the pride of its mantling temptation!" 
 Edgar Allan Poe w^as an acknowledged 
 literary genius. He wrote some poems 
 that are immortal in literature, and that 
 will be read and admired as long as the 
 English language is spoken. Yet wdthal he 
 was a slave to drink, and died as a result 
 of his thralldom to drink. We have from 
 Dr. J. J. Moran, the resident physician of 
 the Washington Hospital in Baltimore, 
 where Poe died, this harrowing record of 
 his death: *Toe came to Baltimore on his 
 way to Philadelphia. He was handsomely 
 
THE KING FOOL 219 
 
 dressed, and had with him an ample ward- 
 robe neatly packed away in his trunk. 
 Upon landing on the wharf from the Nor- 
 folk steamer he was greeted by some of his 
 old and former associates. They insisted 
 that they should all take a glass together 
 for old acquaintance' sake, and the unfor- 
 tunate poet yielded to these persuasions. 
 This, the first drink which he had taken 
 for several months, revived his latent appe- 
 tite for drink, and the result was a terrible 
 debauch, which ended in his death. He 
 lost his trunk and all his wardrobe. When 
 found he was clad in tattered garments 
 and had on an old straw hat, which no 
 one would have picked up in the streets. 
 His appearance and condition were forlorn 
 and pitiable in the extreme. He was 
 brought to my hospital in this drunken and 
 stupid state. Everything that medical skill 
 and faithful nursing could suggest was done 
 for him, but it was all to no purpose. He 
 was either unconscious or delirious through 
 the entire time, some sixteen hours, that 
 he continued to live after entering the 
 hospital, with but one short interval of 
 
220 SIX FOOLS 
 
 consciousness. When for a few moments 
 reason returned, during that one short 
 gleam of consciousness, he looked at me 
 and said with great emphasis, *Dr. Moran, 
 give me a pistol that I may blow my 
 brains out!' Then he suddenly relapsed 
 into his former delirious condition and 
 soon died." 
 
 Charles Stewart Parnell was for many 
 years the remarkably keen and thoroughly 
 trusted leader of the Irish cause in the 
 English Parliament. As a speaker, reserved 
 and dignified, he had a strong and rugged 
 eloquence peculiar to himself. He had an 
 unusual knowledge of parliamentary law, 
 which served him well in the quick give- 
 and-take of public debate. He seemed to 
 have an unlimited measure of common 
 sense and was dowered above all with a 
 masterful will, which made him the ac- 
 knowledged commander of others because 
 he first governed himself. He began entirely 
 alone, and fought his way upward step by 
 step, until some of the greatest statesmen 
 in Great Britain came to believe in him, 
 to respect him, and to espouse his cause. 
 
THE KING FOOL 221 
 
 Gladstone at length became allied with him 
 as an ardent supporter of home rule. He 
 at this time was great enough to offer of 
 his own accord to Mr. Gladstone to retire 
 from public life altogether, if in his judg- 
 ment such an action would be helpful to 
 the Irish cause. When he and others of 
 his party were accused by the London 
 Times of complicity with the crimes and 
 outrages committed by the extreme section 
 of the Irish nationalist party, a commission 
 of three judges was appointed by the 
 British government to investigate. After a 
 great deal of evidence had been received 
 from both sides, a report was laid before 
 Parliament by this commission acquitting 
 him of all the graver charges against him. 
 He sued the publishers of the Times for 
 libel, and obtained a verdict of twenty-five 
 thousand dollars against them. Almost any 
 man with a clear eye for historic per- 
 spective would have said concerning Parnell 
 at this time: "Here is a man who will live 
 in history as one of the world's great 
 figures." But the sin which destroyed 
 Samson undermined him. It was long 
 
222 SIX FOOLS 
 
 covered up and concealed; but, like all sin, 
 as it grew into mastery and control of the 
 man's nature, it became bold and defiant. 
 At last his shame was uncovered before all 
 the world. He was proven to be the guilty 
 corespondent in a divorce case, in which 
 he had destroyed the domestic peace of a 
 home by alienating the affections of a wife 
 from her husband. Then he was asked to 
 retire from the leadership of the Irish 
 cause. He was shown that his cause would 
 certainly fail unless he relieved it of his 
 burden. Gladstone in a letter to John 
 Morley stated that if Parnell continued 
 to be leader, it would be disastrous in 
 the highest degree to the cause of Ire- 
 land. Following the publication of this 
 letter, he was deserted by the great ma- 
 jority of his Parliamentary followers. But 
 his sin seemed to have changed his whole 
 nature, so that he had lost the power to 
 be self-denying or to do great and generous 
 deeds. He fought vigorously to the last 
 to maintain his position as leader of the 
 Irish people. But as Lucifer fell like a 
 star from heaven to the deepest hell, so 
 
THE KING FOOL 228 
 
 he fell from his leadership and from the 
 respect of Christendom. He died as Sam- 
 son died, broken-hearted and in shame. 
 
 Oscar Wilde was a man of brilliant in- 
 tellect, one of Oxford's finest scholars, 
 winning upon his graduation the Newdi- 
 gate prize for English verse. Taking up 
 his residence in London and devoting his 
 time to literary work, his poems are marked 
 by great beauty of thought and melody 
 of movement. He was the author of a 
 number of comedies which are remarkable 
 for their sparkling, epigrammatic cleverness. 
 Upon his visit to this country, as a dis- 
 tinguished apostle of aesthetics, he was 
 given great receptions, and was the social 
 lion of the four hundred in the largest 
 cities of our land. His true character was 
 not at that time known. But he was a 
 man of the flesh, led away and controlled 
 by his baser appetites. Instead of the 
 spirit ruling the body, sensuality was the 
 master. His crimes, when they were dis- 
 covered, appalled all London, being paral- 
 leled only by the most infamous carnal 
 indulgence of the Roman empire in the 
 
224 
 
 SIX FOOLS 
 
 days of its greatest decadence. He spent 
 several years of his life in prison for un- 
 speakable sins, and at last came to a 
 miserable end. 
 
 His wife, who came from a fine fam- 
 ily, with great charity and loyalty, had 
 forborne from seeking even a judicial 
 separation from her husband, after his 
 consignment to prison at hard labor. But 
 she found after his death that the smirched 
 name of the man, who had been execrated 
 by the best people of England, was too 
 great a handicap for her two boys, who 
 were everywhere shunned by the better 
 class of people with whom they happened 
 to come in social contact, as if they were 
 afflicted with some contagious disease. So 
 for their sakes she took the necessary legal 
 steps and resumed her maiden name, and 
 obtained permission for them to adopt it 
 in lieu of that of their dishonored father. 
 
 All these men to whom reference has 
 been made were kings in intellect; but 
 they all erred exceedingly and played the 
 fool. So we find here a teaching that 
 appeals especially to the young man who 
 
THE KING FOOL 225 
 
 prides himself upon his intellectual ability. 
 He would have it understood that he is 
 nobody's fool, and that he is abundantly 
 able to take care of himself. He would 
 have it known that he can drink in mod- 
 eration whenever he feels like it, gamble 
 now and then whenever he is so disposed, 
 and indulge in even worse practices than 
 these whenever he is so minded; and yet 
 he will never allow himself to be carried 
 away or become enslaved by them. 
 
 Many young men have talked just that 
 way who are now hopelessly wrecked in 
 character, broken-hearted, eaten with re- 
 morse, and most pitiable fragments of men. 
 Many a young man has started out in life 
 as a wine drinker who has refused to be- 
 come a total abstainer. He has regarded 
 the obligation of total abstinence as an 
 infringement upon his personal liberty, but 
 he has ended his life in the wreck and ruin 
 of the most terrible bondage. 
 
 When I was a small lad, in one of the 
 homes of my boyhood, I knew the wreck 
 of a man whom they called old Jack Christy. 
 He had formerly been called the Hon. 
 
226 SIX FOOLS 
 
 John Christy, and was a man highly 
 respected and esteemed in that community. 
 He was a distinguished lawyer, well known 
 for his extraordinary talents in that sec- 
 tion of the State, having few equals and 
 no superiors as an eloquent pleader before 
 juries in the courts of that judicial district. 
 He had a large law practice, which was 
 constantly growing, was regarded as a 
 rising politician, and was in great demand 
 as a stump speaker. In public speech he 
 had ready command of a large fund of 
 information; he was witty, logical, and 
 magnetic, and had the power to sway the 
 multitudes at his will. Everyone who knew 
 John Christy admired his brilliant talents 
 and prophesied for him the brightest possi- 
 ble future. But he became a slave to 
 drink. He exchanged a comfortable home 
 for a miserable hovel, the garb of a gentle- 
 man for the rags of a pauper, manhood for 
 beastliness, all that was good in him for 
 all that was bad. Many a time did the 
 saloon keepers of that place call him a 
 miserable drunken loafer, take him by the 
 collar and kick him out into the streets. 
 
THE KING FOOL 227 
 
 Once they had fawned upon him, courted 
 his favor, flattered and praised him. But 
 when he .became a helpless slave to drink 
 and a dirty, ragged pauper, they would 
 not have him loafing around in their 
 saloons because it hurt their business. He 
 was such a dreadful example of what 
 drink will always do that they could not 
 sell drinks nearly as fast when they had 
 him hanging around. Men came in who 
 had known the Hon. John Christy, of only 
 a few years before, looked upon him, and 
 then went out without taking any drinks. 
 So after the saloon keepers had ruined poor 
 old John, body and soul, they made a 
 practice of kicking him out. I have heard 
 John B. Gough and some others of the 
 most distinguished lecturers on intemper- 
 ance upon the American platform. But 
 the most convincing temperance lecture 
 that I ever had given me came in the 
 form of an object lesson when, as a boy, 
 knowing so well his past history and what 
 he might have been, I often saw poor old 
 John Christy go staggering past my father's 
 house. It was an object lesson that burned 
 
228 SIX FOOLS 
 
 itself into my very soul, and that has 
 made me always to hate rum and the rmn- 
 traffic as I hate the devil. My father, as he 
 told me the life story of John Christy, made 
 me pledge eternal enmity against the drink 
 power that had ruined him. Many a time 
 as I saw John Christy go staggering past 
 our house, I doubled up my chubby fist 
 and said, "I'll fight that accursed thing 
 that has ruined John Christy as long as 
 I live." 
 
 The human body is by far the most 
 beautiful, the most exquisite organization 
 that has come from the hand of the Creator. 
 The thoughtful psalmist declared, "I am 
 fearfully and wonderfully made." If that 
 were true in the days of the psalmist, how 
 much greater and grander is the truth in 
 these times of such remarkable progress in 
 physiological science! We can the more 
 fully understand the force of the observa- 
 tion of Galen when he challenged any one, 
 even after one hundred years of study, to 
 find out the smallest bone or fiber of the 
 human body that might be more com- 
 modiously placed either for practical use 
 
THE KING FOOL 229 
 
 or comeliness of form. The inspired apostle 
 well likens man's body to a stately temple, 
 well proportioned and perfect in all its 
 parts; and the author of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews represents Christ as saying to 
 God the Father, ''A body hast thou pre- 
 pared me." These words, in a modified 
 sense, may be used by every one of us. 
 God has done for us what he did for Jesus 
 Christ in that he has put each one of us in 
 possession of a body that we are to take 
 care of and to use only for the noblest ends. 
 George Macdonald gives sound advice to 
 all those who are engaged in bringing up 
 children where he counsels them to treat 
 children as souls having bodies, rather than 
 as bodies having souls. This mistake of 
 regarding children as having souls rather 
 than bodies is a mistake that all religious 
 teachers are apt to fall into. This is the 
 most common method of religious teaching, 
 to be reminding people constantly that 
 they have immortal souls, that God has 
 given to them spiritual natures that must 
 be cared for and cultivated. This is set 
 forth in the stanza of the well known hymn: 
 
230 SIX FOOLS 
 
 A charge to keep I have, 
 
 A God to glorify, 
 A never-dying soul to save, 
 
 And fit it for the sky. 
 
 That is the burden and the drift of nearly 
 all evangelical appeals. But something 
 very important is still left unsaid. It 
 should be constantly and forcefully set 
 forth as a clear and distinctive teaching 
 that it is the mission of Christianity not 
 merely to save souls but to save men; to 
 save men's bodies as well as to save their 
 souls. God has not only given to each 
 one a soul, an invisible and immortal 
 nature, that is to be fitted for a future life, 
 but God has also given to each one a body 
 that is to be kept as a fit temple for the 
 dwelling place of the soul, and that is to 
 be employed in this present life to serve 
 the truest and the noblest ends. 
 
 The highest aim of every individual 
 should be to take the best possible care 
 of the body that God has prepared for 
 him, and bring it to the greatest possible 
 degree of culture and efficiency. This, 
 therefore, should be a daily vow: "A body 
 
THE KING FOOL 231 
 
 thou hast prepared me, O God; and it shall 
 be kept stainless and immaculate for thee." 
 The most startling language in the whole 
 Bible is that which is used to condemn 
 the man who "sinneth against his own 
 body." Paul says, "The body is for the 
 Lord; and the Lord for the body." There 
 is no principle more strongly insisted upon 
 in the Scriptures than that contained in 
 the precept, "Keep thyself pure." There 
 is no vice upon which is threatened more 
 terrible punishment than the evil of un- 
 chastity. The Bible does not so much 
 speak on this matter as it thunders — bolt 
 after bolt, peal after peal — warning men of 
 the awful consequences of carnal indulgence 
 both in this life and in that which is to 
 come. Secret sin against the body is the 
 greatest curse of blossoming manhood. It 
 takes the glow from the cheek, the bright- 
 ness from the eye, and the virility out of 
 the blood. It destroys the will power and 
 the vital energy, weakens the intellect, im- 
 pairs the memory, and paves the way to 
 melancholy, insanity, and death. Social 
 impurity is our nation's unclean dragon 
 
232 SIX FOOLS 
 
 that is strewing the earth with the wrecks 
 and ruins of what otherwise would have 
 been some of the finest examples of noble 
 manhood and womanhood. It is this 
 abhorred spirit of lechery and lust, by 
 whatever name it goes or under whatever 
 guise it masquerades, that would lay its 
 leprous finger upon the lips of virtue and 
 command silence upon this subject, because 
 it is a matter that is too delicate for dis- 
 cussion in public speech and print. But 
 men surely have the God-given right to 
 be as plain and as outspoken against this 
 sin as the Bible is; and the Bible lifts up 
 the most solemn voice of warning to all 
 those who may be tempted to fall into 
 the snares of her whose "house is the way 
 to hell, going down to the chambers of 
 death." "She hath cast down many 
 wounded. Yea, many strong men have 
 been slain by her." "Her house inclineth 
 unto death, and her paths unto the dead." 
 "Let not thine heart decline to her ways, 
 go not astray in her paths. And thou 
 mourn at the last, when thy flesh and thy 
 body are consumed, and say. How have I 
 
 1 
 
THE KING FOOL 233 
 
 hated instruction, and my heart despised 
 reproof." 
 
 History unites with the Scriptures in 
 teaching that nothing more swiftly and 
 utterly works moral and physical ruin than 
 this sin against bodily purity. Hartley 
 Coleridge, the brilliantly endowed son of 
 the great Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was a 
 king in intellect, who in his early manhood 
 gave promise of achievements of genius that 
 would equal those of his distinguished father. 
 But he became a slave to the demon of 
 licentiousness, and speedily passed into a 
 permanent eclipse and died a disappoint- 
 ment to himself and to his friends. When 
 at the age of twenty-five, a physical wreck 
 and with all his vital energies exhausted, he 
 wrote upon the fly-leaf of his Bible: 
 
 When I received this volume small, 
 My years were barely seventeen, 
 
 When it was hoped I should be all 
 Which once, alas! I might have been. 
 
 And now my years are twenty-five, 
 And every mother hopes her lamb, 
 
 And every happy child alive, 
 May never be what now I am. 
 
234 
 
 SIX FOOLS 
 
 How many young men there are in our 
 land who have been ruined by the demon 
 of licentiousness, upon the fly-leaves of 
 whose Bibles these lines might be appro- 
 priately yet sorrowfully written! 
 
 What does this demon of licentiousness 
 really say to every young man? "Come 
 to me, O young man, and I will sap your 
 vital energies, and blight and blacken your 
 future. I will put insuperable barriers in 
 your way, that will mortgage you to death 
 before you have had the opportunity to 
 take the first steps in an honorable career, 
 and I will foreclose my mortgage on you 
 before you have any chance to succeed in 
 life. I will send such throbs of pain along 
 your nerves and muscles that they will 
 make your body a living inferno. I will 
 loosen your joints, and bend forward your 
 frame so as to make you more and more 
 like the four-footed beasts of the field. I 
 will write my signature of infamy all over 
 your person. I will put upon you eating 
 ulcers, and turn your whole body into a 
 lazar house of disease. I will send foul 
 spirits to inhabit your breath, while every 
 
THE KING FOOL 235 
 
 pore of your body reeking with poison 
 will cry out with the lepers of the olden 
 time, 'Unclean!' " 
 
 Talk with prominent city physicians 
 about this sin of social impurity and your 
 blood will run cold, as you hear how this 
 dreadful cancer is eating its way into the 
 very heart of our American life. Visit the 
 wards in our great city hospitals, that are 
 given over entirely to the care of the 
 sufferers from social impurity, and you will 
 there witness the physical torments of 
 literal hells on earth, which will remind 
 you of Dore's illustrations of Dante's In- 
 ferno; and, shuddering from these horrors, 
 as you make your way from a region of 
 "outer darkness" back once more into the 
 light of God's open day, you will think 
 of Dante's inscription over the doorway to 
 hell: "All hope abandon ye who enter here." 
 
 The obligations of the marriage relation 
 should be regarded as equally binding upon 
 both husband and wife. Public opinion 
 should be so changed in this land that 
 it will come to stand upon a platform that 
 shall insist upon two things: that it shall 
 
236 
 
 SIX FOOLS 
 
 mete out exactly the same condemnation 
 to men offenders as it does to women 
 transgressors of the law of social purity; 
 that it shall also stand ready to help 
 with equal heartiness the guilty woman 
 back to a pure life, when she gives evidence 
 of genuine repentance, as it is now to aid 
 the repentant and often unrepentant guilty 
 man. 
 
 We have all observed these outline facts 
 again and again in the history of every- 
 day life. A young man, who moves in 
 aristocratic circles and who has wealth, 
 under most sacred promises betrays sweet 
 innocence. She, from that her first sin 
 of this kind, turns downward. Is it much 
 to wonder at, when nine tenths of the 
 world stand ready to give her and her 
 unfathered child a push toward hell? But 
 how shamefully often it is the case that, 
 after his sin has been proclaimed upon the 
 very housetops, he is received into the 
 highest social circles in the place where 
 he lives. He is smiled upon by fond 
 mothers, who would look with favor upon 
 him as a prospective son-in-law. And 
 
THE KING FOOL 237 
 
 what is their comment? "O, yes. He is 
 just a httle wild. He has been somewhat 
 fast. All young men have their time for 
 sowing their wild oats, and he has sown 
 his full share of them. But that is past 
 now. He will settle down all right. He is 
 so bright, so witty, so congenial. He has 
 such charming manners, and then, you 
 know, he is very well off." They say, 
 '*He is all right," and public opinion 
 accepts their verdict. But as surely as 
 there is a God in heaven, that man, unless 
 he repents of his great sin and seeks to 
 make full amends for his monstrous wrong, 
 will eventually, either in this world or in 
 some other world, receive his just pun- 
 ishment. 
 
 The day will come when womanhood 
 will demand just such purity of the man- 
 hood that it weds as manhood everywhere 
 now demands of the womanhood that it 
 weds. I would that we might have a 
 national brotherhood of men, that would 
 take in all ranks and classes of men, who 
 would pledge themselves to treat all women 
 with respect and would seek to protect 
 
238 SIX FOOLS 
 
 them from wrong and degradation; who 
 would endeavor to put down all indecent 
 language and obscene stories; who would 
 seek in every way possible to give to their 
 boys and younger brothers proper informa- 
 tion concerning the sexual laws of their 
 being and to warn them most earnestly 
 against the sin of social impurity; who 
 would maintain the law of purity as 
 equally binding upon men and women; and 
 who would give daily obedience to the 
 command, ''Keep thyself pure." 
 
 Christ has given a very impressive pic- 
 ture of a young man who played the fool 
 for a time, who demanded and received his 
 share of the patrimony, who journeyed into 
 the far country and there spent his sub- 
 stance in riotous living. That young man 
 erred exceedingly and played the fool; but 
 the moment he resolved to return to his 
 father's house he stopped playing the fool 
 and became a man. For the most of 
 men who go in the way of evil it is but 
 a short distance into the far country; but 
 it is such a long way back that a man 
 never will get back to the Father's house 
 
THE KING FOOL 239 
 
 unless he comes by the way of the cross. 
 Sometimes a young man will travel away 
 from honor and rectitude countless leagues 
 in one single act. That young man now 
 beginning his sentence behind the bars 
 as a defaulter, only six short months ago 
 was classed among the highly respectable 
 people of the community where he lived. 
 What a short distance he had to travel 
 lo get into the far country, when he took 
 the few minutes to forge the note, which 
 led to his trial, conviction, sentence and 
 imprisonment, and what a long and weary 
 way it now seems to him to get back to 
 the place of respect and esteem in which 
 he was once held! What an almost in- 
 finite distance it seems to be between that 
 yesterday, only a few brief months ago, 
 with its serene peace and calm beauty, 
 and to-day with its flush and fever of 
 shame, its deep reproach, its bitter re- 
 morse, its darkness and its heartbreak. 
 When we start on our journey back from 
 the far country we find that God comes a 
 good deal more than half way to meet us 
 at the cross of Christ. We never will get 
 
240 
 
 SIX FOOLS 
 
 back to the Father's house unless we come 
 by the way of Calvary. At last, when 
 this young man came to himself, when 
 he struck bottom, when he got hold of 
 the last thing that was left, himself, when 
 he came to his own conscience, his own 
 heart and his own intellect, then he was 
 thoroughly aroused, then he said, "I will 
 arise and go to my father." Into whatever 
 sin we may go, and whatever distance we 
 may travel into the far country, whenever 
 we feel our own urgent need of the Father 
 and decide to return to him, we will always 
 
 find him waiting to welcome us. 
 
 'AH 
 
 the fitness he requireth is to feel our need 
 of him;" and as we thus come to our best 
 selves, and come back from the far country 
 by way of Calvary, we may look up and 
 see Some One else ready to meet us there 
 at the cross, our Father, who will willingly 
 receive us. 
 
VI 
 THE NO-GOD FOOL 
 
A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to 
 atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's 
 minds about to religion. — Bacon. 
 
 In its investigations of questions of origins sci- 
 ence has made a discovery. It has seen plainly 
 that atheism is unscientific. It is a remarkable 
 thing that atheism, after trailing its black length 
 for centuries across European thought, should have 
 its doom pronounced by science. — Henry Drummond. 
 
 The inward conviction, the craving for a final 
 cause, the theistic assumption, is itself one of the 
 master facts of the universe and is as much en- 
 titled to respect as any fact in physical nature can 
 be. — John Fiske. 
 
 \\ 
 
VI 
 
 THE NO-GOD FOOL 
 
 The Syrian sky, into which the psalmist 
 had so often looked, is amazingly clear; 
 so free from fogs, mists, and clouds that 
 through the most of the year with the 
 unaided vision one is enabled to study the 
 movements of the heavenly bodies. That 
 luminous firmament and its unclouded skies 
 account for some very considerable achieve- 
 ments that were gained in astronomy in 
 the Oriental countries long before the 
 telescope was invented. The psalmist had 
 spent many a night out in the open in 
 Palestine in that wonderfully transparent 
 atmosphere gazing up at the silent, sentinel 
 stars. The longer he observed and studied 
 and meditated the more did he become 
 aware of the vastness, the grandeur, and 
 sublimity of the works of creation, and 
 the more did he come to believe in the 
 existence of an all-wise Creator. There 
 
 243 
 
244 
 
 SIX FOOLS 
 
 came to him the strong conviction, which 
 finds expression in so many portions of 
 the Psalms, that all these marvelously 
 created works must have back of them a 
 Divine Framer and Creator. "The heavens 
 declare the glory of God; and the firma- 
 ment showeth his handywork." He had 
 grown to have such a strong, all-mastering 
 confidence in the existence of a God that 
 it had become at last a fundamental belief. 
 It was an assurance that had taken such 
 a hold upon his very soul that he was 
 driven to the conclusion that it was only 
 the fool who could say in his heart, "There 
 is no God." This assertion that there is 
 no God is not the verdict that results from 
 a careful examination of existing evidence, 
 but it comes always from shallow in- 
 vestigation. 
 
 The universe is one vast procession of 
 effects that are related to causes. What 
 we at first call causes, on a closer inspec- 
 tion and analysis resolve themselves into 
 effects. But every effect must have a 
 cause that is adequate to the effect. As 
 only an Almighty Cause can be efficient 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 245 
 
 for such vast and varied effects, the great 
 original fontal cause must be God, the 
 Father Almighty. 
 
 We find design evident everywhere. De- 
 sign implies mind; mind implies thought; 
 thought implies a thinker; a thinker im- 
 plies a person. Thus step by step we rise 
 to the conception of an Almighty Person, 
 who is above us and around us. 
 
 We find in our environment that we are 
 bound in upon every side by limitations 
 that are incident to our own finiteness. 
 But all these intimations, suggestions, evi- 
 dences of our finiteness point to the exist- 
 ence of an Infinite One, who is uncircum- 
 scribed and unlimited as to his powers and 
 abilities. We cannot have the finite without 
 premising the Infinite. 
 
 The illusive phantom of the ideal, that 
 is always before us and that is never fully 
 attained, points irresistibly to a perfect 
 Personality and Character, who is the 
 causal source, from whom the inspiration 
 of all our own ideals must come. The 
 master in literary work is never fully sat- 
 isfied with even the best products of his 
 
246 SIX FOOLS 
 
 pen. After many weary months spent in 
 most careful composition and in constant 
 correction and revision, even then his 
 production comes far short of what he 
 thinks it ought to be. The sweetest music, 
 the finest painting, the most perfect stat- 
 uary, the sublimest eloquence, are never 
 quite equal to the demand of the highest 
 ideal of the true musician, the real artist, 
 the genuine orator. 
 
 No great thinker ever lived and taught you 
 All the wonder that his soul received; 
 
 No true painter ever set on canvas 
 All the glorious vision he conceived. 
 
 We, in all our noblest efforts to be kind 
 and patient, sincere and honest, good and 
 true, are continually falling short of our 
 highest ideals. These shortcomings, these 
 failures, this incompleteness, and the fact 
 that owing to our limitations we are never 
 fully satisfied here, show that we are 
 eventually to find complete satisfaction in 
 God and in a future life that is uncir- 
 cumscribed. 
 
 We also find that man is possessed of 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 247 
 
 a conscience, and that conscience stands 
 for righteousness. Therefore there must be 
 some righteous Cause, of which such con- 
 science, protesting for righteousness, is the 
 effect. If conscience is the voice of God 
 in man, telUng him that he ought to do 
 what his judgment prompts him is right, 
 then the conclusion is simply overwhelming 
 that there must be back of the voice a 
 holy and a righteous personal God, who 
 thus speaks in and through man. No 
 conviction lays hold of us with such force 
 as the power of conscience. What Kant 
 called "the moral imperative" asserts its 
 sway over the human mind and heart. The 
 ear would not hear if there were no atmos- 
 phere. The eye could not see if there were 
 no light. So the soul would not tremble 
 under its obligation if there were no God. 
 
 But men in our time are not content 
 to take the position of the Bible and to 
 assume the existence of a God without 
 attempting to prove it. They must argue 
 him in or out of the universe. The battle 
 of theism has been a long and a fierce one. 
 But there is no question but that on the 
 
248 SIX FOOLS 
 
 field of argument theism has won the 
 fight. 
 
 Yet it is only fair to say that the form 
 of the theistic argument has changed with 
 the passing of the years. We do not now 
 place the emphasis upon the argument 
 from design, which Paley thought so strong. 
 We are most impressed by the moral 
 argument. We look not so much to the 
 world without as to the life within for the 
 evidence of the living God. We are sure 
 of some things. We know there is life, 
 for we live. We know there is thought, 
 for we think. We know there is a God, 
 for we yearn and long for the help of a 
 higher power than human power. We 
 know that God is because there is im- 
 planted within the human soul the desire 
 to worship him. 
 
 We find in nature no organic instinct 
 ever given without its proper environment. 
 The cushioned foot of the camel has the 
 desert sands. The fin of the fish is en- 
 vironed by water, the wing of the bird 
 by the air, the migrating instinct by 
 climate, the ear by sound, and the eye 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 249 
 
 by light. So we are driven by logical 
 necessity to the belief that this great thirst 
 that has been placed within every human 
 soul for the living God is one of the strong- 
 est evidences that God is, and that he is 
 the rewarder of them that diligently seek 
 him. Just as the vine mounts continually 
 upward, because it is in love with the 
 light and desires to greet the light, so 
 human souls everywhere reach out after 
 God, "if haply they might feel after him, 
 and find him, though he be not far from 
 every one of us: for in him we live, and 
 move, and have our being." 
 
 When the dove flew forth from Noah's 
 hand out of the window of the ark, and 
 then after flying hither and thither over 
 the vast expanse of waters, unable to 
 find any resting place, flew back to the 
 hand that had let it go, it gives to us a 
 picture of the soul seeking earthly pleasures, 
 and yet always driven back to God, who 
 alone can satisfy. Abraham was not satis- 
 fied with the things of earth, for he was 
 constantly looking forward to his final 
 entrance into that "city which hath foun- 
 
250 
 
 SIX FOOLS 
 
 dations, whose builder and maker is God." 
 Moses was not satisfied, for he esteemed 
 "the reproach of Christ greater riches 
 than the treasures in Egypt. He had 
 respect unto the recompense of the reward. 
 He endured as seeing him who is invisible." 
 David was not satisfied, although he had 
 many things to cause him to rejoice. He 
 lived in a palace, surrounded by luxury 
 and possessing everything that the heart 
 could desire upon the material side. Yet 
 in the midst of his palatial and luxurious 
 surroundings he longed for a sense of the 
 Divine Presence: "My soul thirsteth for 
 God, for the living God." 
 
 Man comes to his best life only in pro- 
 portion as he recognizes the presence and 
 authority of an almighty and beneficent 
 God. He comes to his noblest self only 
 when he believes in a God from whom he 
 may learn his duty. He finds peace of 
 mind and heart only as he believes in a 
 God to whom his love can go out with 
 strong yearning and in whom his troubled 
 and despondent soul may find satisfaction. 
 God and man belong to each other, and 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 251 
 
 the soul will never find rest until it finds 
 rest in him. 
 
 Men like George John Romanes, who 
 during his day was a most prominent 
 figure among English scientists and the 
 highly esteemed personal friend of Charles 
 Darwin, have by the formal processes of 
 their own subjective logic been brought to 
 renounce agnosticism and to make an 
 enthusiastic and personal acceptance of the 
 faith of Christianity. Many of this class, 
 who have made science the ultimate appeal 
 in all rational inquiry, and have left no 
 basis or sphere for religion, have not been 
 able to rid themselves of the ineradicable 
 longing and thirsting for God. They have 
 found that the heart has fundamental 
 premises which are valid even if reason 
 cannot fathom their meaning. They have 
 perceived that logical processes are not 
 the only means of research in regions 
 transcendental. They have ascertained that 
 reason is not the only attribute of man, 
 nor is it the only faculty which he habit- 
 ually employs for the ascertainment of 
 truth. They have discovered that moral 
 
252 
 
 SIX FOOLS 
 
 and spiritual faculties are of no less im- 
 portance in their respective spheres, even 
 in dealing with the problems of every- 
 day life. 
 
 If we believe in God, we must believe 
 in the divine Fatherhood. Among the 
 large number of references that are made 
 to the Supreme Being in the Old Testa- 
 ment he is mentioned just seven times as 
 Father. Five times he is referred to as 
 the Father of the Hebrew people. Once 
 the promise came to David that God 
 would be a Father to his son, Solomon; 
 and once the prophecy was made that in 
 the future men would pray to God as 
 their Father, a prediction that was fulfilled 
 in the Sermon on the Mount, when Christ 
 taught men to say, "Our Father." In 
 the Old Testament there is no record of 
 any prayer in which God is addressed as 
 Father. We have the recorded words of 
 several prayers in which the holy men of 
 God called upon him by those names by 
 which they best knew him, but there is 
 not a single one in which they call upon 
 him as Father. They had always known 
 
 ! 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 258 
 
 him as the Eternal, the Creator, the Cap- 
 tain of the armies of heaven, the Judge, 
 the Lord of Hosts, the Self-Existent One, 
 the Supreme Ruler. But this conception 
 of God as the Father in heaven was very 
 far removed from the thoughts of the 
 patriarchs and of the multitudes to whom 
 was addressed the Sermon on the Mount. 
 
 The New Testament is the only real 
 text book upon the Fatherhood of God that 
 has ever been given to the world. Christ 
 was the first and the greatest teacher of 
 this doctrine, and he so wove his own 
 personality into, its teaching that he made 
 men believe it and love it, feel it and live 
 by it. Christ taught this doctrine re- 
 peatedly, and in his preaching it was a 
 constantly recurring topic. The expres- 
 sions: "The Father," "Our Father," "My 
 Father," "Your Father," occur nearly one 
 hundred times within the four Gospels. 
 During the three years of Christ's earthly 
 ministry he no doubt gave utterance to 
 the thought that God is our Father more 
 times than it had appeared in all the 
 uninspired literature of all nations since 
 
254 
 
 SIX FOOLS 
 
 the world began. Because some grains of 
 gold have been found here and there in 
 nearly all our Western States they are 
 not therefore spoken of as gold-bearing 
 States in the sense in which California 
 and Alaska are spoken of as gold-bearing 
 States. Some few grains of this teaching 
 of the Fatherhood of God may be found 
 here and there scattered throughout all the 
 world's literature that was produced up 
 to the time of Christ. But the super- 
 abundance of the teaching in the New 
 Testament is such, as found in the words 
 of Jesus, as to give to him the preeminent 
 title as the greatest teacher of this doctrine. 
 Christ taught that God is our Father; 
 that he upholds us in the hands of his 
 loving providence; that he pardons our 
 offenses, having borne in his own heart, by 
 the death of his Son, the burden of our guilt; 
 that he perfects our natures and rounds out 
 our characters into symmetry and beauty 
 by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit; and 
 that he will at last bring us to the heavenly 
 home, where our joy will be made complete 
 and perfect, because of his presence. 
 
 1 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 255 
 
 How wonderfully that promise of Jesus 
 clarifies our views of God! — "In my Fa- 
 ther's house are many mansions." He 
 here shows that God is our Father, that 
 he has a home, that that home is vast, 
 embracing many mansions. There are 
 some men who seek by vague definitions 
 and by unmeaning terms to put God just 
 as far away from the reach of humanity 
 as possible. They call him "the Unknow- 
 able," "the Absolute," "the Independent," 
 "the Power not ourselves that works for 
 righteousness," "the Infinite Geometrician," 
 "the Universal Force." But Jesus does 
 not do any such thing as that. He teaches 
 that God has a conscious existence and is 
 therefore a substantial, an existing Per- 
 sonality. 
 
 The best religious thought of our day 
 seeks to interpret God in the light of his 
 Fatherhood. We have had in philosophy 
 and in theology almost endless speculation 
 about the nature of God. The successive 
 ages have viewed him in different lights. 
 Our fathers looked upon him as a world 
 ruler. His kingship, greatness, power, and 
 
256 SIX FOOLS 
 
 majesty stood at the front. His will was 
 everything; men were little or nothing. 
 Then came the idea of God as governor, 
 conceived under the form of a hmnan 
 executive, and who must be just and holy 
 as any ideal governor has to be. Theol- 
 ogy under this teaching became cold, for- 
 mal, and official, and the atonement, the 
 richest doctrine of the Christian faith, 
 became dominated by the forensic element. 
 But our generation has a far deeper and 
 truer thought of God. God is not a being 
 sitting apart from the universe and watch- 
 ing it as he might watch some immense 
 clock of infinite proportions which he had 
 wound up and left to run down. God is 
 immanent and active, purposing, overruling, 
 guiding and working in human affairs. 
 We no longer hold to that old mediaeval 
 conception of a transcendent God, who is 
 located apart from the world, as an on- 
 looker at its struggles, and only occasionally 
 interfering by superhuman portents and 
 prodigies. Science and faith now both 
 unite in the belief in an immanent God, 
 who is everywhere present in nature and 
 
THE ISrO-GOD FOOL 257 
 
 in grace, who reveals to men his glorious 
 purposes, and who asks that they shall be 
 workers together with him in the work of 
 the world's redemption. We no longer hold 
 to the thought of a far-away God, with 
 whom we have only legalistic and formal 
 relations in his government over us, but 
 we believe in God as the One "in whom 
 we live, and move, and have our being." 
 
 The agnostic holds to the position that 
 he will not believe anything unless it is 
 something that he himself has seen, and 
 that he will not accept anything unless it 
 is something that he has experienced or of 
 which he has been personally cognizant. 
 Yet competent testimony is a well-estab- 
 lished source of knowledge. The most of 
 all that we know is based upon testimony. 
 All that we apprehend of the past history 
 of other races and of other ages is thus 
 derived. All that we learn of the places, 
 the cities, and the countries of the world, 
 except those we have visited, comes from 
 the same source. All the legal business of 
 all lands and nearly all the business which 
 men prosecute daily rest also upon the 
 
258 SIX FOOLS 
 
 same foundation. Can you conceive of 
 a more ridiculous position than that of 
 anyone who should declare, "I will not 
 believe anything unless it is something I 
 myself have seen, nor will I accept any- 
 thing unless it is something I have expe- 
 rienced or of which I have been personally 
 cognizant"? If all should take that posi- 
 tion, the wheels of the world's commerce 
 would be blocked, trade would be paralyzed, 
 all confidence between man and man would 
 be destroyed, and the bonds that hold 
 society together would be shattered into 
 fragments. The modern agnostic professes 
 to be a very keen logician. He delights 
 in dwelling upon the sophisms, the de- 
 fective reasoning, and the changing views 
 of different systems of belief as proving 
 that there is no basis of certainty for any- 
 thing. He enjoys putting up one system 
 against another and then showing how the 
 one destroys the other. He is continually 
 pointing us to the dark segments of the 
 sphere of knowledge, and declaring that w^e 
 are certain of only one thing — namely, that 
 we do not know anything with certainty. 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 259 
 
 Ask the modern agnostic, "Is there a God?" 
 and he answers, "We know nothing about 
 it." "Has man a soul? Is this soul im- 
 mortal? Is there a future life? Is there 
 a place of reward and punishment? Is man 
 an accountable being before a higher tri- 
 bunal than this world?" And he answers, 
 "All these things are unknown and un- 
 knowable." 
 
 The pantheist affirms that the universe, 
 the all, is God. But if God is our Father, 
 he is surely a conscious Person. He under- 
 stands, he knows, he loves, he feels and 
 wills and thinks. These qualities can be 
 affirmed only of a conscious person, of a 
 God who is our Father. Renan in one of 
 his pantheistic books written many years 
 ago uses this expression, "Our Father the 
 Abyss." That man must regard himself 
 as of no more value than the inanimate 
 rock, than insensate matter, who regards 
 that Power "in whom we live, and move, 
 and have our being," as only a blind, 
 unyielding impersonal force. That man 
 must indeed feel himself to be an orphan, 
 who above and beneath and beyond, 
 
260 SIX FOOLS 
 
 amid all environment, can find no father 
 but an Abyss — bottomless, boundless, sight- 
 less, thoughtless. But there is just one 
 word in Christ's Sermon on the Mount 
 that at once dissipates all atheistic, agnos- 
 tic, pantheistic and materialistic fogs, and 
 that word is "Father." 
 
 The right and truthful conception of the 
 divine character must form the foundation 
 of true faith. "Without faith it is im- 
 possible to please him: for he that cometh 
 to God must believe that he is, and that 
 he is a rewarder of them that diligently 
 seek him." Yet we cannot have faith in 
 a Being whom we cannot love. The com- 
 mand is: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
 God with all thy heart, and with all thy 
 soul, and with all thy mind, and with all 
 thy strength." But it is presupposed in 
 the giving of this command, that God is 
 a being who is in every way worthy of all 
 our love. If God be an unjust, an unkind, 
 a cruel and revengeful despot, then (I say 
 it reverently) even the command to love 
 him does not make it right to love him. 
 The righteousness of loving God does not 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 261 
 
 consist merely in obedience to an outward, 
 an external command to love him, but it 
 consists in that instantaneous and abiding 
 recognition within oursel\5es of those lov- 
 able qualities of character that we may 
 find in him as "the chief est among ten 
 thousand, and the one altogether lovely." 
 So, then, if the Christian religion is to win 
 men everywhere to love God, it must 
 present God as a Being who is in every 
 way worthy of such love. 
 
 The ancients separated their gods from 
 man, sometimes fancying them to be on 
 the raging ocean, sometimes in the forests, 
 sometimes on the mountain tops, some- 
 times in the clouds. But they dwelt far 
 away from man, so that when they were 
 wanted they could never be found. If 
 any man would receive favor from them, 
 they must be propitiated, conciliated, and 
 cajoled by many sacrifices and offerings. 
 But it is the glory of our blessed Chris- 
 tianity that God comes here to us. "The 
 Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." 
 After Christ had entered upon the work of 
 his public ministry, at his command diseases 
 
262 SIX FOOLS 
 
 fled. The deaf heard, the bhnd saw; the 
 lame walked; lepers were cleansed. Devils 
 departed from the bodies of those whom 
 they had possessed; the dead rose up from 
 their graves; the chainless winds were 
 hushed, and the angry waves grew calm. 
 Heaven, earth, and hell were alike subject 
 to his omnipotent control. As the great 
 Teacher he was never weary of receiving 
 any who were willing to receive him. As 
 a worker of miracles he was ever perform- 
 ing deeds of compassion for the poor, the 
 afflicted, and the helpless. As the Lamb of 
 God that taketh away the sin of the world 
 he suffered upon the cross, the just for the 
 unjust, praying for his murderers: "Father, 
 forgive them; for they know not what 
 they do." This same Jesus is our God, 
 for his name is "Emmanuel, God with us." 
 "He that hath seen me hath seen the 
 Father." 
 
 That God who has been represented as 
 being in partnership with men for breaking 
 bones and sinews upon the barbarous rack 
 of torture and burning heretics at the 
 stake; that God who has been portrayed 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 263 
 
 as taking delight in human suffering and 
 misery; that God who has been depicted 
 as taking far more pleasure in the punish- 
 ment of the wicked than in the deeds of 
 the righteous; that God, be it ever remem- 
 bered, is not the God who reigns in the 
 heavens. He is not the God of the Bible. 
 He is not the God of true Christianity. 
 He is not the God who has been revealed 
 in the person of Jesus Christ. That God 
 is a horrible myth. That God is a vile 
 creation, that has sprung from the fanatical 
 imaginations of bigoted men. That God, 
 or, rather, that base, that false and ig- 
 noble idea of God, never has been worthy 
 of the love of man. "The Lord is mer- 
 ciful and gracious, slow to anger and 
 plenteous in mercy. He will not always 
 chide: neither will he keep his anger for- 
 ever: he hath not dealt with us after our 
 sins; n'or rewarded us according to .our 
 iniquities. For as the heaven is high above 
 the earth, so great is his mercy toward 
 them that fear him. As far as the east 
 is from the west, so far hath he removed 
 our transgressions from us." "God sent 
 
264 SIX FOOLS 
 
 not his son into the world to condemn the 
 world; but that the world through him 
 might be saved." 
 
 When you are wearied out with the 
 work and the battle of this laborious life, 
 and are longing for home and rest and 
 love; when you are saddened by losses and 
 bereavements, and are longing for that 
 consolation and sympathy which the world 
 cannot give you; when you find that 
 temptation is becoming too strong for you, 
 and you cry out with Paul: "O wretched 
 man that I am! who shall deliver me from 
 the body of this death?" — ^Ah! then re- 
 member that God is thy Father, and that 
 **like as a father pitieth his children, so 
 the Lord pitieth them that fear him; for 
 he knoweth our frame, he remembereth 
 that we are dust." Our Father! blessed 
 relationship! That Christ should appro- 
 priate such language as this for himself 
 does not seem strange to us. But that 
 he should instruct us to take such words 
 upon our own sinful lips may well lead 
 us to exclaim, "Behold, what manner 
 of love the Father hath bestowed upon 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 265 
 
 us, that we should be called the sons of 
 God." 
 
 If we believe in God, we must believe 
 in the universal human brotherhood. Christ 
 came to proclaim the common brotherhood 
 of all races and classes of men, by reveal- 
 ing God as our Father. He showed him- 
 self to be the friend of publicans and 
 sinners. He manifested equal sympathy 
 for the slave in chains, the beggar by the 
 wayside, the prince in the palace, and the 
 ruler on the throne. The whole bearing 
 and spirit of his life proclaimed this great 
 divine principle of the human brother- 
 hood. We may find in this grand prin- 
 ciple of the essential equality of man, and 
 his individual responsibility to a heavenly 
 Father, some of the germ principles of the 
 world's greatest reforms, some of which 
 have already been achieved and many 
 others to be accomplished in the years to 
 come. It was this dual principle of father- 
 hood and brotherhood taught by Christ 
 that inaugurated the mightiest social and 
 moral revolution that the world has ever 
 known: "One is your teacher, and all ye 
 
266 SIX FOOLS 
 
 are brethren. One is your Father even 
 the heavenly. One is your guide even the 
 Christ." The world has been a long time 
 in learning the great lesson of the uni- 
 versal human brotherhood as taught by 
 the Christ. When that lesson is fully 
 learned a large majority of the much dis- 
 cussed questions between capital and labor 
 will be forever settled, for then we shall 
 be under the sway of obedience to the 
 Golden Rule. 
 
 The English barons at Runnymede were 
 inspired by the claims for essential equality 
 and for the rights of the individual con- 
 science when they wrested from despotic 
 King John the Magna Charta, which is 
 the foundation of all Anglican liberty to- 
 day. The keynote of the Magna Charta 
 is sounded in that declaration, which lay 
 at the very basis of it: "No freeman shall 
 be seized, or imprisoned or dispossessed, or 
 outlawed, or in any way brought to ruin. 
 To no man will we sell or delay or deny 
 justice or right." 
 
 Wickliffe, the bright morning star of 
 the Reformation, threw back the strong 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 267 
 
 light of a most vigorous life upon the path- 
 way that led his followers to the more 
 perfect day. He was a true Protestant, 
 for he protested with all the might of his 
 great soul that every man has the right 
 to examine the Bible for himself, that no 
 man has the right to make another's con- 
 science his slave. 
 
 When Luther nailed his theses to those 
 cathedral doors at Wittenberg every blow 
 that Luther struck with his hammer was 
 a blow for the rights of the individual 
 conscience. 
 
 Our own forefathers, the signers of the 
 Declaration of Independence, caught the 
 spirit of Magna Charta, the spirit of 
 Wicklijffe, the spirit of Luther, the spirit 
 of Christ, when they said, '*We hold these 
 truths to be self-evident, that all men are 
 created equal, that they are endowed by 
 their Creator with certain inalienable rights; 
 that among these are life, liberty, and the 
 pursuit of happiness." 
 
 When men learn that they all belong to 
 a great brotherhood it will make them 
 literal philanthropists, lovers of men. When 
 
268 SIX FOOLS 
 
 they learn that Jesus Christ by the grace 
 of God hath tasted death for every man 
 that knowledge will tend to change haughty 
 Levites into good Samaritans. When they 
 recognize the full force of the "As my 
 Father hath sent me, even so send I you," 
 that will increase our missionary funds, our 
 church building funds, our college and 
 hospital endowment funds, a hundred fold. 
 The Macedonian call, "Come over and 
 help us," is coming from all those who are 
 in degradation and in darkness. All these 
 are our brothers, whether the skin be 
 black or brown or red or yellow or white; 
 all, whether they be ignorant or educated, 
 wicked in conduct or righteous in character. 
 They are all our brothers, and as brethren 
 may we learn to "bear one another's bur- 
 dens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." He 
 who discerns the signs of the times cannot 
 fail to discover that all things are tending 
 toward establishing the claims of the uni- 
 versal human brotherhood. May that time 
 be as near at hand as it seems to be when 
 the clash of arms in warfare and in carnage 
 shall be heard no more. 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 269 
 
 When the war-drums throb no longer, 
 And the battle-flags are furled; 
 
 In the Parliament of men, 
 The federation of the world. 
 
 The watchword of the gospel of Christ is 
 a fraternity as broad as humanity. When 
 men learn to feel these ties and claims of 
 the universal, human brotherhood, the 
 South Sea islander and the Hottentot, 
 Negro and Indian, will rise into the dig- 
 nity of men who are our brothers. The 
 poor man engaged in his struggle for his 
 daily bread, the bootblack, the chimney 
 sweep, the newsboy, all engaged in daily 
 toil, may be comforted and elevated by 
 the thought that they are the children of 
 the same common Father with us all. 
 
 If we believe in God, we must believe 
 in a future life. The belief in a future 
 life is a God-given principle, that is innate 
 within every human breast. Man in every 
 condition of society, both civilized and 
 savage, has universally believed in a future 
 life. The deep yearnings of the human 
 heart in all ages declare this belief in a 
 future life. Therefore this omnipresent, un- 
 
270 SIX FOOLS 
 
 deniable, indestructible, ineradicable fact 
 must prove to us that this is God's own 
 affirmative answer given everywhere to 
 man's question: "If a man die, shall he 
 live again?" 
 
 Is it reasonable to suppose that God, 
 who knows so well this innate yearning 
 for immortality, which he himself has 
 formed and has, placed within every human 
 breast, should fan this yearning until it 
 becomes a perfect flame of desire, and then 
 at death cruelly rob us of everything that 
 is dearest to us? You could not imagine 
 any human father who was sane who 
 would create within the eager heart of his 
 own little child some fond desire and then 
 nourish and feed that intense longing for 
 some coming great boon, to which the 
 child is led to look forward with the great- 
 est hope and expectancy of realization, and 
 then at last be brought to the most bitter, 
 the most crushing disappointment. Such 
 a parent would be an inhuman monster 
 who would not deserve the name of father. 
 And yet that is just the position taken by 
 those who deny the palpable connection 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 271 
 
 between this innate, universal yearning for 
 a future life and the omnipotent, loving 
 Father, who has placed this unquenchable 
 longing within every human breast, and 
 who purposes to satisfy this inherent de- 
 sire with a glad and triumphant fulfill- 
 ment. We deny totally the righteousness 
 of God if we say that he has created within 
 us the desire for immortality and then 
 cheats and deceives us by destroying us. 
 Belief in God and in the future life go 
 together; they are inseparable. If we be- 
 lieve in God, we must believe in a fu- 
 ture life. 
 
 If we admit the fact that there is a 
 divine government, we acknowledge with 
 that very admission that there is a future 
 life, for a future life is necessary in the 
 plans of a divine government for the 
 righting of wrongs, for securing equity and 
 justice for those who have never had them 
 in this life. If joy and sorrow, pain and 
 pleasure, gratification and wretchedness, as 
 experienced in this life, are the only re- 
 wards and punishments, then their dis- 
 tribution is such as to outrage man's sense 
 
272 
 
 SIX FOOLS 
 
 of justice. If the moral government of 
 God is limited to this life only, then it is 
 most unjust. If God is just and wise and 
 good, as we all believe him to be, all wrongs 
 will some day be righted. All will receive 
 their just deserts of reward and punishment, 
 which they have failed to receive here, 
 and justice will some day be done to those 
 who have suffered great injustice here. 
 Thus there comes to everyone the demand 
 for a future, where there shall be a * 'remedy 
 for every wrong, a satisfaction for every 
 soul"; where the ideal of justice shall be 
 revealed in which the good shall receive 
 the reward of the good, and the wicked 
 the reward of the wicked; where all the 
 maladjustments and incongruities of this 
 life shall be made forever right. Belief 
 in a divine government and in a future 
 life go together; they are inseparable. If 
 we believe in a divine government, we 
 must believe in a future life. 
 
 The princely, the magnificent endow- 
 ment of man's mental and moral nature 
 shows that the problem of life cannot be 
 solved without immortality. Man's insa- 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 273 
 
 liable thirst for knowledge is here never 
 fully satisfied. His capacity for loving and 
 being loved cannot be circumscribed by the 
 narrow limitations of this brief present life. 
 These facts, that are inwrought within us 
 all, show that immortality alone can sat- 
 isfy the value of the unknown quantity in 
 the equation of life. God, our Creator, 
 nowhere else in this wide world has made 
 such a miscalculation in the relation be- 
 tween the given energy and the work to 
 be accomplished by that energy as would 
 be at once manifest in case death means 
 final extinction. God everywhere recog- 
 nizes the economy of forces, and he would 
 not have given to man such a magnificent 
 endowment of mental and moral qualities 
 if they were only for exercise and use 
 during this little earthly life. God has 
 not made man like the skyrocket, that 
 climbs so quickly to its zenith, flames out 
 its beauties for one brief moment, and then 
 is swallowed up in the inclosing darkness. 
 He has shown to us clearly the principle 
 of an orderly and masterly administration 
 everywhere in the realm of material things. 
 
274 SIX FOOLS 
 
 and he has manifested the same principle 
 in the creation and endowment of man. 
 He has not so blundered in his adjustments 
 as to equip man with a wealth of intel- 
 lectual activity suflficient for the ages of 
 ages, and then decreed that he should have 
 no use for his princely endowments after 
 the brief span of the earthly life is over. 
 Why was man so richly endowed, if all 
 that he has and all that he now is, is to 
 come to naught? Why all this waste of 
 such splendid mental and moral powers? 
 If man, with all the God-given powers with 
 which he has been endowed, be mortal and 
 perishable; if he is to sink at the coming 
 of death into annihilation, then he is only 
 an utter waste of creative energy. 
 
 There are bonds of human love that 
 link us to a future life in a chain which 
 cannot be broken. Are these cries from the 
 fountain of unsatisfied love, a love which 
 is conscious of a power for growing and 
 enlarging throughout future endless years, 
 always to be answered only by the empty 
 echoes of our own cries? Are these sacred 
 friendships and holiest affections harshly 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 275 
 
 severed by death, when those holding them 
 have only just begun to feel the sweet 
 ecstasy of loving and being loved, to re- 
 main forever broken and sundered? Are 
 the yearnings of our hearts to rejoin our 
 loved and lost to remain forever unre- 
 quited? Reason gives to these questions 
 the overwhelming negative. Love feels 
 that it has an undying fervor and intensity 
 that go beyond the "earth to earth, ashes 
 to ashes, and dust to dust." Love is 
 assured that the passion of the heart sur- 
 vives all the onslaughts of materialism. 
 Love believes 
 
 Since He who knows our need is just — 
 That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. 
 
 What is excellent 
 
 As God lives, is permanent; 
 
 Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; 
 
 Hearts* loves will meet thee again. 
 
 We cannot believe in the justice and the 
 goodness of God if we believe that the 
 grave is the end of all. We cannot believe 
 in the Fatherhood of God if we deny im- 
 mortality to man. 
 
276 SIX FOOLS 
 
 The revelation of nature furnislies still 
 farther evidence in the light of conscience. 
 It has already been noticed that the voice 
 of conscience in man, which speaks for 
 righteousness, must point with unerring 
 finger to an omnipotent righteous Person- 
 ality back of the voice that thus speaks. 
 If conscience thus goes to prove the exist- 
 ence of a God, it is equally conclusive in 
 establishing the fact of immortality. The 
 deepest organic instincts of conscience have 
 in all nations and in all ages predicted 
 rewards and punishments after death. 
 Shakespeare recognized that in the presence 
 of death "conscience makes cowards of us 
 all" and that "the dread of something after 
 death makes us rather bear those ills we 
 have than fly to others that we know not 
 of." This prophetic instinct in conscience 
 is not the result of education, but it be- 
 longs to the original structure of human 
 nature. It must be that it points to 
 reality, or else, as Joseph Cook has said, 
 "Conscience itself is an organized lie." 
 It has already been observed that in the 
 revelation of nature no organic instinct is 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 277 
 
 ever given without its proper environment. 
 So the existence of these omnipresent, un- 
 deniable, unquestionable instincts of con- 
 science in normal human nature, leads us 
 to anticipate rewards and punishments after 
 death. Therefore the inevitable conclusion 
 is that death does not end all, because we 
 cannot be rewarded and punished where 
 we do not personally exist. Sir Oliver 
 Lodge, president of the British Association 
 for the Advancement of Science, in his 
 famous address before that body at Bir- 
 mingham upon the subject of "Continuity," 
 asserted his belief in the persistence of 
 personality after bodily death, and rebuked 
 the negative scientific spirit of the age, 
 which tends to deny the existence of any- 
 thing which makes no appeal to the organs 
 of sense. He asserted that unitary con- 
 ception of the universe, which naturally 
 leads the thought to God, and announced 
 his conviction of continuing life after death 
 founded on scientific research. 
 
 The doctrine of a future life is nowhere 
 formally asserted in the Old Testament, 
 yet it is clearly taught in many instances 
 
278 SIX FOOLS 
 
 by implication, just as the doctrine of the 
 belief in the existence of a God is nowhere 
 formally declared in the Old Testament, 
 it being everywhere assumed and implied 
 without formal statement. Many of the 
 earliest patriarchs have left upon record 
 clear and explicit testimonies as to this 
 belief in a future life. They all confessed 
 that they were strangers and pilgrims upon 
 earth, declaring plainly that they sought 
 another country, that is, a heavenly. The 
 psalmist believed it when he said, "As for 
 me, I will behold thy face in righteousness; 
 I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with 
 thy likeness." Isaiah was assured of it 
 when he aflfirmed, "Thy dead men shall live, 
 together with my dead body shall they 
 arise." David was fully persuaded of the 
 reality of a future life when he declared 
 concerning the child that had been taken 
 from him by death, "I shall go to him, but 
 he shall not return to me." The Old 
 Testament everywhere implies this doctrine 
 of a future life because it clearly teaches 
 that man possesses a spiritual nature which 
 allies him to another and a higher sphere, 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 279 
 
 and which points irresistibly to a con- 
 tinuance of the Hfe of the spirit in a heav- 
 enly realm. The sixteenth Psalm, for 
 example, abounds throughout with expres- 
 sions of trust in God, and love for the 
 One who is always at our right hand and 
 who protects and keeps us. The psalmist 
 breaks out in glad confidence: "Therefore 
 my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth; 
 my flesh also shall rest in hope. Thou 
 wilt show me the path of life; in thy pres- 
 ence is fullness of joy; at thy right hand 
 there are pleasures forevermore." This is 
 one of the few instances in the Old Testa- 
 ment in which the heart of the sacred 
 writer becomes so full of an abounding 
 faith in immortality that it overflows in 
 most joyous utterances of hope. The very 
 essence of this trust is that the psalmist 
 feels that he has partaken of the divine 
 nature. Something of the holiness of God 
 has been implanted within his breast. 
 Therefore God cannot and will not suffer 
 him to be annihilated. So this clear teach- 
 ing of the Old Testament is that man 
 possesses a spiritual nature, an immortal 
 
280 SIX FOOLS 
 
 spirit that is capable of taking into itself 
 the divine nature. He has a capacity for 
 holiness that may be filled with the holi- 
 ness of God. Such an one comes to feel 
 that he is born of God, that he is a child 
 of God and an heir of God. He is con- 
 vinced, he knows, that he cannot be 
 confined in the grave, and that his true 
 place is in the heavens with God, of whose 
 nature he now partakes, and to whose 
 everlasting kingdom he must belong. 
 
 The New Testament gleams with the 
 glory and splendor of the light that it 
 throws upon this doctrine of a future life. 
 Zacharias declared in exultant song before 
 the birth of this mightiest of conquerors, 
 the conqueror of death, "The day spring 
 from on high hath visited us, to give light 
 to them that sit in darkness and in the 
 shadow of death." The triumphant song 
 of the angelic hosts over the plains of 
 Bethlehem, "Peace on earth, good will 
 toward men," is in the same key. There 
 never could be peace on earth without the 
 victory over death. Then come the works 
 of the Master, lifting dead bodies from 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 281 
 
 their couches into all the fullness of their 
 lost health, and calling them back from 
 the loathsome corruption of the tomb to 
 strength and to life again. Then come the 
 words of the Master, most fitting to ac- 
 company such mighty works, announcing 
 himself to be the resurrection and the life, 
 and that whosoever liveth and believeth 
 in him should never die; saying that in 
 three days he would raise up the temple 
 of his body, that he had power to lay 
 down his life and to take it again, speaking 
 of the many mansions of his Father's house, 
 and repeatedly declaring that this life is 
 but the beginning of the life that is ever- 
 lasting. 
 
 There are no other facts of ancient his- 
 tory that are sustained by such an array 
 of evidence, external and internal, as the 
 facts of the life, death, and the resurrec- 
 tion of Christ. Christ based his whole 
 mission and ministry upon his resurrection. 
 If he did not rise, then he was a falsifier. 
 But to a confessedly sinless character this 
 was impossible. A falsity could not have 
 brought about the wonderful transformation 
 
282 SIX FOOLS 
 
 in the apostles, who were suddenly changed 
 from a condition of the deepest despair 
 to that of the utmost courage. The 
 apostles had every opportunity for thor- 
 oughly satisfying themselves as to the 
 truth or the falsity of the resurrection of 
 Christ, and they had the most absolute 
 faith in the resurrection as a fact. This 
 is shown from their placing their hopes 
 and their preaching upon the resurrection 
 of Christ as a foundation that could not 
 be shaken. It is only the fact of the 
 resurrection that can account for the mar- 
 velous change that took place in the 
 spirit and character of the apostles. Fraud 
 or fiction could never have brought about 
 the mighty moral revolution that was 
 wrought in the lives of these men. The 
 resurrection completely transformed them. 
 It inspired them with a new conception of 
 Christ's kingdom as for all people, and 
 filled them with a zeal and enthusiasm 
 which could know no limits as they engaged 
 in work for Christ. 
 
 When Peter, only a few months after 
 Christ's resurrection, made his masterly de- 
 
THE NO-GOD FOOL 283 
 
 fense before the Sanhedrin, it was grounded 
 upon the great fact of a risen Christ. 
 How utterly Peter's argument would have 
 been demolished if the Sanhedrin could 
 have produced the dead body of Christ! 
 They did not dare try to produce it, and 
 they did not dare so much as to suggest a 
 doubt of the resurrection of Christ. Paul's 
 First Epistle to the Corinthians, which 
 contains that remarkable argument on the 
 resurrection in the fifteenth chapter, was 
 written within twenty-seven years of the 
 actual resurrection, and Paul fearlessly ap- 
 peals to more than two hundred and fifty 
 yet living witnesses of the fact. 
 
 "Jesus and the resurrection" was the one 
 theme that the apostles everywhere pro- 
 claimed. It was the creed by which they 
 lived and the one by which they were most 
 glad and willing to die. For them "to 
 live was Christ, to die was gain." Stephen 
 went home rejoicing. Paul hailed the day 
 of his departure with the greatest joy. 
 Peter looked forward with the utmost 
 eagerness to his coming day of deliverance. 
 John said, with that spirit of confidence 
 
284 SIX FOOLS 
 
 born of absolute certainty: "We know that 
 when he shall appear, we shall be like him; 
 for we shall see him as he is." The stu- 
 pendous change of the Sabbath day from 
 the seventh to the first day of the week 
 is a perpetual memorial of the resurrection. 
 The very existence of the Christian Church 
 proves it, for the resurrection was the 
 corner stone of the apostolic teaching and 
 preaching. The resurrection of Christ is 
 not only a proof of the truth of Chris- 
 tianity, but it is a proof of our own immor- 
 tality. Materialism affirms that death is 
 a wall; the resurrection clearly shows that 
 it is a door into a larger life. Jesus entered 
 into death, passed through it triumphantly, 
 and emerged on the other side in glorious 
 life. Because he lives we shall live also. 
 We have a li\'ing church because we have 
 a living Christ. The works that have 
 been wrought by Christ and by a living 
 Christianity in this world ever since his 
 resurrection are a proof that he who has 
 thus wrought and who is now working these 
 wonders is a risen and a regnant Christ. 
 
Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
 Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
 Treatment Date: Dec. 2004 
 
 PreservationTechnologies 
 
 A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 
 
 1 1 1 Thomson Park Dnve 
 Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
 (724) 779-21 1 1 
 

 =:I':'':■'^^:■:.:''!^i•:^q|'ii|iiil 
 ^Vl:i|!!'"■'l'^^'lM•^^'i■j;i|li'ii 
 
 I'i I'll!''* iiMii 
 
 'm4 
 
 
 •-m: i,r'>T;i;'h-ii! 
 
 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 013 610 232 1 
 
 > ■ilUllMtr i' 
 
 
 iii 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 T; 
 
 1 
 
 ^^H 
 
 
 , 1 ' ■ 
 
 ' 1 
 
 1 ; 
 1 i ' 
 
 ■ 
 
 '. 1 1 1 1 l^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H 
 
 1 
 
 f 
 
 i 
 
 i 
 
 i;' 
 
 !!• 
 
 M ! i 
 
 ^^^^^1 
 
 H 
 
 ( 
 
 ( 
 
 % 
 
 ^'iiiiiiiiiiia 
 
 ^^^^^^^^^^^1 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 III 
 
 i 
 
 ij 1 
 
 m 
 
 ^^^^^^^1