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
All this is gone. The only wealth of the past which has survived is
such as Christ referred to. “I have meat to eat that ye know not of.”
The ideas and the literature which enshrined them alone remain. Not the
manuscripts. They are gone, as though God would show in the most vivid
way His scorn of the visible and earth’s “real.” Not one original page
of Plato exists. But Plato’s mind is here still. The kings are gone.
But Isaiah and Jeremiah, the men of the inward resources, spokesmen and
ministers of the invisible life, abide.
“The tumult and the shouting dies
The captains and the kings depart
Still stands Thine against sacrifice
A humble and a contrite heart.”
And the issue is clear enough when we look at it concretely to-day
and contrast the men who have the inward resources with those who
have not, the movements which are fed from deep ideal springs with
those which deal skin-deep only with humanity. In one of our American
cities the president of a large institution was shelved in the prime
of life by younger and less conservative men who acquired control of
the business. They treated the older man well, gave him the nominal
headship with his former salary, but really transferred all the power
to other men. It was the chance of a lifetime for the older man. He had
his strength and his time for any service or ministry or pleasure he
might choose. But the only meat which he had to eat was the management
of the business, and accordingly he starved to death in a fine home
and with a large salary. All that the bag of his body needed he had,
but man cannot live by bread alone without a word from God. The Tinker
of Bedford Jail heard the key turn in the lock behind him. And did
he famish alone? He opened the gate of his house within and out they
came――Christian and Great-Heart and Hopeful and Evangelist and Mercy
and Dare-to-Die――and the loneliness of John Bunyan’s cell became the
greatest society on earth, and the immortals who marched out of the
wealth of his soul are the companions of millions who could not name
one human being who was Bunyan’s contemporary. The rich men who have
transmitted real wealth have been the lovers, the dreamers, the servers
who ate bread at God’s hands and who knew and taught men that the life
is more than meat and the body than raiment. “She was not daily bread,”
wrote her niece of Emily Dickinson. “She was star dust.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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