When asked about these doors and their purpose, Dr. Conwell would make
some casual reply, generally to the effect that they might be excellent
as fire-escapes. To no one, for quite a while, did he broach even a hint
of the great plan that was seething in his mind, which was that the
buildings of a university were some day to stand on that land
immediately adjoining the church!
At that time the university, the Temple University as it is now called,
was not even a college, although it was probably called a college.
Conwell had organized it, and it consisted of a number of classes and
teachers, meeting in highly inadequate quarters in two little houses.
But the imagination of Conwell early pictured great new buildings with
accommodations for thousands! In time the dream was realized, the
imagination became a fact, and now those second-floor doors actually
open from the Temple Church into the Temple University!
You see, he always thinks big! He dreams big dreams and wins big
success. All his life he has talked and preached success, and it is a
real and very practical belief with him that it is just as easy to do a
large thing as a small one, and, in fact, a little easier! And so he
naturally does not see why one should be satisfied with the small things
of life. "If your rooms are big the people will come and fill them," he
likes to say. The same effort that wins a small success would, rightly
directed, have won a great success. "Think big things and then do
them!"
Most favorite of all maxims with this man of maxims, is "Let Patience
have her perfect work." Over and over he loves to say it, and his
friends laugh about his love for it, and he knows that they do and
laughs about it himself. "I tire them all," he says, "for they hear me
say it every day."
But he says it every day because it means so much to him. It stands, in
his mind, as a constant warning against anger or impatience or
over-haste--faults to which his impetuous temperament is prone, though
few have ever seen him either angry or impatient or hasty, so well does
he exercise self-control. Those who have long known him well have said
to me that they have never heard him censure any one; that his
forbearance and kindness are wonderful.
He is a sensitive man beneath his composure; he has suffered, and
keenly, when he has been unjustly attacked; he feels pain of that sort
for a long time, too, for even the passing of years does not entirely
deaden it.
"When I have been hurt, or when I have talked with annoying cranks, I
have tried to let Patience have her perfect work, for those very people,
if you have patience with them, may afterward be of help."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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