The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American CharacterSpeer, Robert E. (Robert Elliott)
Philosophy
The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character
Speer, Robert E. (Robert Elliott)
Character; Christian life; Conduct of life; Moral education
What I have been saying is certainly true in the realm of our physical
energies. I remember a story of John Lawrence, who went out to India a
raw, uninfluential Irish boy in the service of the East India Company,
resolved to do his work well and make himself a name. Very early in
his career he was assigned to the collectorship of the Jullundur Doab,
on what was then the frontier of India. He made himself perfectly
at home among his people, entering into their life, mastering their
vernaculars, learning their secrets, until at last men came to think of
“Jans Larens” as a demi-god with powers beyond the knowledge of common
men. One day as he was sitting in his house a messenger came in from
one of his districts and reported that a village was burning down and
begged him to come. He hurried out to the village. When he arrived he
asked the headmen if they had all the people out of the houses and was
told that all had been brought out except one old woman who refused to
come. He went to the house where the woman lived and looked in. There
she sat on a bag of grain. Lawrence entreated her to come out but she
refused, explaining that this bag of grain was all her earthly wealth.
If she came out she would starve; she would rather stay and be burned.
When Lawrence found his commands and entreaties unavailing, he rushed
in, with the embers from the burning roof falling on his shoulders,
stooped over and picked up the bag of grain, and left the burning
building, the old woman following obediently behind. The next day as he
was sitting in his house it flashed on his mind that the bag of grain
had been exceedingly heavy and he rode out curiously to the village
again to see how much he had lifted. He had no difficulty in finding
the old woman and her bag of grain. He stooped over to lift it but
could not budge it from the ground. But the day before he had budged
it. He had picked it up and carried it. The power to do it was lying
latent in him all the while. All he needed was just the piercing call
or inspiration adequate to release the buried energy.
And the world is full of evidences that what is true physically is true
morally. In every man lies the power with the grace and help of God to
meet his great crisis and in every woman the power to bear the agony
and pain of her great hour. Only a few years ago, when the _Titanic_
went down and some men who had walked as dogs at the heel of their
passions suddenly became masters of themselves and laughing stood at
attention to death as they waited on the deck, we all wondered what it
was that gave these men who had been slaves their sudden moral mastery.
That mastery was within all the time. It did not come out of the frame
of the _Titanic_. It did not come out of the iceberg. It was lying
buried all the while only waiting the hour and the Voice that was to
summon it to come forth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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