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IF WE ONLY UNDERSTOOD.
If we knew the cares and trials,
Knew the effort all in vain,
And the bitter disappointment.
Understood the loss and gain?
Would the grim, eternal roughness
Seem?I wonder?Just the same?
Should we help where now we hinder,
Should we pity where we blame?
Ah! we judge each other harshly,
Knowing not life's hidden force;
Knowing not the fount of action
Us less turbid at its source;
Seeing not amid the evil
All the golden grains of good;
And we'd love each other better,
If we only understood.
Could we but draw back the curtains
That surround each other's liveB,
See the naked heart and spirit,
Know what spur the action gives,
Often we should find it better,
Purer than we judge we should,
We should love each other better
If we only understood.
l .
Could we judge all deeds by motives,
See the good and bad within,
Often we should love the sinner
All the while we loathe the sin;
Could we know the powers working
To overthrow integrity,
We should judge each other's errors
With more patient charity.
?Rudyard Kipling.
THE LAW OF ACTION.
JULIAN W. MACK,
Au incorrigible or so-called "bad" boy of
the streets was bailed before a judge. The
judge contemplated sending him to a boys'
prison, but the culprit began to sob:
"1 ain't no tief. I wants work. 1 don't
want to go to prison."
Now, the judge had the power to put the
boy to work?at any kind of work suitable to
his age and strength. But he deemed it wise
to ask the boy:
"What kind of work do you want?"
The over-matured face and the sombre eyes
lightened as the reply came:
"Kin I run an engine?"
"Most certainly you can," replied the judge,
"after you have learned to thread bolts, handle
ashes and oil, clean parts, and know the laws
of heat, water, steam, and their relation to
machinery. In ten years' time you ought to
be able to run an engine."
"Gee!" exclaimed the boy. "Give me de
chance!"
He got it and slowly, painfully, he is creeping
out of the pit of inaction?idleness?into
the knowledge of true action, and he is no longer
incorrigible. Getting the action he hungered
for has aroused a new moral nature in
him. Beginning to understand the law of mechanical
things that of the spiritual is forced
upon his attention.
The story is offered to the parents of boys,
particularly to the worrying mothers, whose
children are not incorrigible, but to whom the
law of action haa not yet appealed because
he has not yet been properly consulted about it.
A mother has a love for music and the piano.
With her family grouped about her she continues
to cultivate that art. In so doing she is
obeying the normal instincts or powers of the
law of action. If, however, she has the love
of music within her heart, and ignores it and
PRESBYTERIAN OF THE S
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forces herself each hour of the day to disagreeable,
offensive toil, she is then disobeying
the law of action and weakening her usefulness
that much. She is not a complete woman.
The natural love of music within her is no
different in its origin from the hidden ambition
within the breast of her young son. To set
her will against his latent desire, to endeavor
to bend him "her" way and not to lead him
his way, is to starve him, incite inward rebellion,
and possible eventual flight on his part to
atmospheres where his hunger for certain action
may have legitimate play. How much
happier and stronger the situation if she lead
him into free expression of his innermost desires
until she learns what kind of action he desires,
and then guide him into it!
How blind many mothers are to this power
of action over a normally healthy boy may be
illustrated by a short story. A country boy
wished to enter an electrical machine shop,
making that his life work. His mother had
other plans for him; she had toiled all her life
until prosperity came and her wishes for him
were of a rather aristocratic nature. She did
not wish liini to soil his hands. Only brain
work counted in her opinion?muscular labor
was repugnant.
A machine shop snielled ill; the work was
greasy; the machinery might maim him; she
feared his associates would be coarse, and so
on through a long list of objections. Each of
these the boy met with stubborn insistence that
he would be a machinist, or with a sullen silence
that augured ill for the home peace. Finally,
the mother gave in in this manner. She
visited a friend of the family, and said:
"Get Frank the machine shop position he
wants; but without his knowledge I want the
work made so hard for him that he will hate
it in a few days, give up, come home and do as
1 want him to."
The friend protested that this was not honest
to the boy, but the mother pleaded and argued,
and at last the boy was installed in a
shop in a neighboring city and the foreman
was privately instructed to "load" him?a brutal
process of killing off a worker.
About two weeks later the friend happened
to meet the foreman and inquired after the
fate of Frank. The official laughed:
"What did you tell me to 'load' that kid
for? Eh? The more we put on him the more
he smiled. He was pretty raw in trying to
learn things, but he wasn't afraid of work and
he obeyed. I stopped loading him in two days'
time. He's too good to be abused. He gets
the next promotion in the shop. He just loves
machinery."
And the inexorable working of the natural
law of action in that boy's heart, given a chance
to play in the open, conquered that unseeing,
unreasoning mother. The same story might be
told of scores of boys who have loathed the
choking ways of the town and wished to return
to the soil; who have feared machinery and its
whirr, but hungered for the law and its studies;
who, intuitively feeling the call of action be
fore they have had knowledge, have overrid
den parental authority for the sake of the free
dom of the best in themselves.
Do we take a fine pacing, trotting or run
ning horse and hitch him to the plow, where
he chafes to death 1 No; no more than we take
the plow horse and ask him to pace, trot or
run. The pointer dog is not asked to do the
1
O U T H [August 7, 1912
work of the Newfoundland. The labor of the
Jersey cow is sharply distinct from that of
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Guernsey.
Each in this world to his own appropriate
place, according to his natural and acquired
abilities, and no greater evidence of wisdom
can be given on the part of a mother than when
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"This child of mine is masculine. The masculine
type essentially means love of action.
What is in his innermost thoughts t I wish
him to become a minister, a lawyer, a merchant,
a hanker, but is the power of action within
him inclining in that direction T What does he
most wish to do?
There are chances, frequent chances, that a
hoy himself may misread the message of the
law of action. He may misinterpret himself to
learn his mistake later and swing into the true
course. But suppose he does? Suppose he apno
ranllxr tli rinrw owotr oovnrol m on av
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periment ? That is not all of life. He has
grown while ascertaining his mistake. Ther*
are many reasons for thinking that he will be
stronger for having blundered, providing the
blunder is not rubbed into him.
The potent, vital thing about him is that he
wants action. A law has its irresistible force
upon him. Every effort on the part of another
to thwart that law does not injure it, but strikes
at him. He is choked, he feels thwarted, his
sense of self-mastery is retarded in development.
lie may become halting, uncertain, timid,
and what should have been a self-reliant
man degenerates into an effeminate "sissy."?
Mother's Magazine.
THE MAN WITHOUT A HOME.
Wild with joy and mad with excitement,
the people of Paris surged around the palace
of their old King Louis.
It was a dark and stormy evening in October,
but the great city was gay with lights
and full of merriment. No one in the crowd
stopped to look at the pale, worn, foreign
young man sitting lonely and sad among the
statutes in the garden of the Royal Palace.
France was going to war with Spain, and the
French people had recovered their insolence and
vainglory.
It was only seven years since Wellington
had hurled Napoleon into the dust at Waterloo,
and set the old King Louis on the French
throne. And already France was busy collecting
a hundred thousand troops to invade and
a ;~
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"Look at that skulking Englishman!" some
of the crowd said. "What a scarecrow! Ha!
King Jjouis is a better man than Napoleon. Hewon
't be beaten by -the perfidious English."
' At the sound of their wild insults the young
i man looked up, moodily and savagely. The
i poor fellow had not the heart to make any reply.
He was foot-sore with tramping about the
I city, and faint for want of food.
, An actor from Drury Lane Theatre and ?
friend of Charles Lamb and Lord Byron, he
? had spent all his money in traveling to Paris in
the hone of finding cmnlovment there. But
i the feeling against the English had grown so
bitter that no Frenchman would have any;
thing to do with the young actor from London.
"We don't want any more Englishmen in
Paris," they said to him.
"American or English, it is all the same,
Yon speak French with the same had accent
and we don't want you."
? The young foreigner spoke the truth when
. he said he was an. American. Born in a little cot
tage on the outskirts of Ney York in 1791, he
i had come to London at the age of twenty-one