deterioration has slain her tens of thousands. If you don't believe it, study the facts of the case. 2. Note the widespread field of deterioration's campaign. In the development of talents, unconscious deterioration hesitates not to strike the highest as well as the lowest. Dr. M. J. McLeod tells of a young man, who, fifty years ago, left the service of his country after giving four years of enduring hardship. "Heroic service had he rendered and he came out of the Civil War with medals. His mother, in her girlhood, was a distinguished beauty and ever a representative of the noblest type of womanhood. His father was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of one of the proudest of the thirteen original states. He, himself, became governor of that state. Less than thirty years ago the man was tall, stately, kingly, eloquent, wealthy, charming. Today, his picture hangs in the rogues' gallery. On trial in Boston a few years ago, he said: 'I am but fifty-eight years old, but look at me! My hair is white, my skin is browned and seasoned, my cheeks are hollowed, my frame is shrunken, my hands palsied like a man of eighty. Opium and morphine, the twin curses of my life, were not content in undermining my physique, they attacked my mind and my moral nature.' ” Looking at that life you see the fatal sting of unconscious deterioration. In the middle of the eighteenth century, a poor Scottish farmer set himself to give his children all that he could of his own companionship that he might make up the deficit of the education which his penury denied. Among the large family of this humble Scottish home grew up one youth of marked characteristics. "A proud, headstrong, impetuous lad, greedy of pleasure, greedy of notice," yet having this personal vainglorying somewhat mollified by the splendid powers of body, mind, and soul that were possessed by him. His wonderful ability of expressing homely and insignificant things of everyday life soon won for this farmer's lad association with the prominent. He was everywhere in Edinburgh received with acclaim by the titled and the great. But, alas, he who had achieved the friendship of the great, who wrought his name into the temple of fame by his immortal "Auld Lang Syne," "Cotter's Saturday Night," "Lines to a Mountain Daisy," who ought to have laboured long, as did Wordsworth and Browning and Tennyson, after a brief six months of his greatest productive work began to totter and fall. He who had been the guest of lords and ladies "is now whistled to the inn by any curious stranger." He fain would get enough for his family to eat as an exciseman. As Robert Louis Stevenson says of him: "His death in his 37th year was indeed a kindly dispensation. He had trifled with life and must pay the penalty. He had grasped at temporary pleasures, and substantial happiness and solid industry had passed him by. He died of being Robert Burns." That you might realize the tragedy of the man who might have been, but who was not through unconscious deterioration, read Burns' own sad epitaph: "Is there a whim-inspired fool, Owre fast for thought, owre hot for rule, Here pause and through the starting tear, In the development of moral capacity is the blight seen most deplorably. Made morally in the image of God, unconscious deterioration so blinds the moral perception of men and women that God's holiness is dragged down in the dust. A young business man told me not long ago that it was very rare to find any exhibition of conscience in a business transaction. He was not a misanthrope. He was merely stating a fact. This does not mean that conscience is not here. Rather does it mean that the rapid rise in real estate values and the consequent desire of getting rich quick and the opportunity of so doing has unconsciously deteriorated our judgment of moral values. Several years ago at Yale University I heard a graduate of national reputation give a most inspiring address on the moral responsibilities of citizenship. To day, because of his dealings, none so poor as to do him reverence. A well-known New York minister once told me of a certain man who through many years had been a tower of strength in his church as Superintendent of Sunday School, yet that same man became the great corruptionist head of the political ring that prostituted justice in New Jersey and defeated the will of the people. I think that neither one of these men were hypocrites intentionally. They were but representatives of the great army of those who suffer from unconscious deterioration. Do you think a United States Senator for a great sum, or a California State Senator for $300, or a municipal officer for other sum, realizes what he is doing when he sells his birthright for a Mess of Pottage? Rather have these seen so much corruption, breathed so constantly of the atmosphere of loose financial dealing that unconscious deterioration has made them forget that bribery held us in the same class with lying and thieving. In the realm of the heart unconscious deterioration leaves the mark of her deadly sway. The feelings, the impulses of a man are God's noblest gifts. You see sometimes a character as beautifying as a block of ice, sparkling in the sunshine, but as frigid, because love is not there. You see a life as pure as a slab of Italian marble, but as cold, because love for God is not there. You see men and women who once felt the yearnings after the noblest and the highest but they heeded not, and unconscious deterioration has dried up the fountains of the heart. Going into the wilderness and fighting down unconscious deterioration is the only safeguard. Through lack of watchfulness, through palliating excuses comes deterioration. We must build up a public sentiment which will call a lie a lie, a theft a theft, and undeveloped talents a sin against ourselves and against God, and we must measure ourselves thereby and not some one else. We must get ingrained in our consciousness that insincerity and untruthfulness are at the basis of all deterioration. This is what Ruskin was always preaching. He saw that there were Seven Lamps of Architecture and the brightest of these was the Lamp of Truth. Says he, "Nobody wants ornaments in this world but everybody wants integrity. All the fair devices that ever were fancied are not worth a lie." His keen eye saw the wreckage that lying had wrought in all the affairs of man's work. Here lying stones in the foundation, there lying tiles in the roof, yonder lying paint on a plaster column had wrought destruction and ruin to great cathedrals with priceless treasures of art and of beauty. In righteous indignation, he exclaims, "It is good for us to remember this, as we tread upon the bare ground of these foundations and stumble over its scattered stones. Those rent skeletons of pierced wall, through which our sea winds moan and murmur," bear continuous testimony.* "It was not * Ruskin, "Seven Lamps of Architecture," II-19. |
