waste deep waters; around thee mutinous, discouraged souls, behind thee disgrace and ruin, before thee unpenetrated veil of night. Brother, these wild water-mountains, bounding from their deep bases-ten miles deep, I am told, are not entirely there on thy behalf! Meseems they have other work than floating thee forward; and the huge winds that sweep from Ursa Major of the tropics and equator, dancing their giant waltz through the kingdoms of chaos and immensity, they care little about filling rightly or filling wrongly the small shoulder-of-mutton sails in this cockle skiff of thine! Thou art not among articulate speaking friends, my brother; thou art among immeasurable dumb monsters, tumbling, howling wide as the world here. Secret, far-off, invisible to all hearts but thine, there lies a help in them. See how thou wilt get at that. Patiently thou wilt wait until the mad southwester spend itself, saving thyself by dexterous science of defence the while; valiantly, with swift decision, wilt thou strike in when the favoring east, the possible, springs up. Mutiny of men thou wilt sternly repress; weakness, despondency, thou wilt cheerily encourage; thou wilt swallow down complaint, unreason, weariness, weakness of others and thyself-how much wilt thou swallow down! There shall be a depth of silence in thee deeper than this sea which is but ten miles deep; a silence unsoundable, known to God only. Thou shalt be a great man. Yes, my world-soldier, thou of the world marine-service, thou wilt have to be greater than this tumultuous, unmeasured world here around thee is; thou in thy strong soul, as with wrestler's arms, shalt embrace it, harness it down, and make it bear thee on to new Americas, or whither God wills! Religion, I said, for, properly speaking, all true work is religion; and whatsoever religion is not work may go and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, spinning dervishes, or where it will; with me it shall have no harbor. Admirable was that of the old monks. Laborare est orare, "work is worship." Older than all preached gospels was this unpreached, inarticulate, but ineradicable, forever-enduring gospel: Work, and therein have well-being. Man, son of earth and of heaven, lies there not, in the innermost heart of thee, a spirit of active method, a force for work; and burn like a painfully smoldering fire, giving thee no rest till thou unfold it, till thou write it down in beneficent facts around thee! What is immethodic, waste, thou shalt make methodic, regulated, arable; obedient and productive to thee. Wheresoever thou findest disorder, there is thy eternal enemy; attack him swiftly, subdue him; make order of him, the subject, not of chaos, but of intelligence, divinity and thee! The thistle. that grows in thy path, dig it out that a blade of useful grass, a drop of nourishing milk may grow there instead. The waste cotton-shrub, gather its waste white down, spin it, weave it, that in place of idle litter there may be folded webs, and the naked skin of man be covered. But above all, where thou findest ignorance, stupidity, brutemindedness, attack it, I say; smite it wisely, unweariedly, and rest not while thou livest and it lives, but smite, smite in the name of God! The Highest God, as I understand it, does audibly so command thee-still audibly, if thou have ears to hear. He, even He, with His unspoken voice, fuller than any Sinai thunders or syllabled speech of whirlwinds-for the silence of deep eternities, of worlds from beyond the morning-stars, does it not speak to thee? The unborn ages; the old graves, with their long-moldering dust, the very tears that wetted it, now all dry-do not these speak to thee what ear hath not heard? The deep death-kingdoms, the stars in their never-resting courses, all space and all time proclaim it to thee in continual silent admonition. Thou, too, if ever man should, shalt work while it is called to-day. For the night cometh wherein no man can work. All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand-labor, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven. Sweat of the brow; and up from that to sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart-which includes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all sciences, all spoken epics, all acted heroisms, martyrdoms,-up to that "agony of bloody sweat" which all men have called divine! O brother, if this is not "worship," then I say, the more pity for worship; for this is the noblest thing yet discovered under God's sky. Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil? Complain not. Look up, my wearied brother; see thy fellow-workmen there in God's eternity; surviving there, they alone surviving; sacred band of the immortals, celestial body-guard of the empire of mankind. Even in the weak human memory they survive so long, as saints, as heroes, as gods; they alone surviving; peopling, they alone, the unmeasured solitudes of time! To thee heaven, though severe, is not unkind. Heaven is kind as a noble mother, as that Spartan mother, saying while she gave her son his shield, "With it, my son, or upon it!" Thou, too, shalt return home in honor, to thy far-distant home in honor, doubt it not, if in the battle thou keep thy shield! Thou, in the eternities and deepest death kingdoms, art not an alien; thou everywhere art a denizen! Complain not; the very Spartans did not complain. |