The Crown of Wild Olive
the world's children work for the world's good, honestly, with head and
heart; and come to it, saying, 'Give us a little bread, just to keep the
life in us,' the world-father answers them, 'No, my children, not bread;
a stone, if you like, or as many as you need, to keep you quiet.' But
the hand-workers are not so ill off as all this comes to. The worst that
can happen to _you_ is to break stones; not be broken by them. And for
you there will come a time for better payment; some day, assuredly, more
pence will be paid to Peter the Fisherman, and fewer to Peter the Pope;
we shall pay people not quite so much for talking in Parliament and
doing nothing, as for holding their tongues out of it and doing
something; we shall pay our ploughman a little more and our lawyer a
little less, and so on: but, at least, we may even now take care that
whatever work is done shall be fully paid for; and the man who does it
paid for it, not somebody else; and that it shall be done in an orderly,
soldierly, well-guided, wholesome way, under good captains and
lieutenants of labour; and that it shall have its appointed times of
rest, and enough of them; and that in those times the play shall be
wholesome play, not in theatrical gardens, with tin flowers and gas
sunshine, and girls dancing because of their misery; but in true
gardens, with real flowers, and real sunshine, and children dancing
because of their gladness; so that truly the streets shall be full (the
'streets,' mind you, not the gutters) of children, playing in the midst
thereof. We may take care that working-men shall have at least as good
books to read as anybody else, when they've time to read them; and as
comfortable fire-sides to sit at as anybody else, when they've time to
sit at them. This, I think, can be managed for you, my working friends,
in the good time.
IV. I must go on, however, to our last head, concerning ourselves all,
as workers. What is wise work, and what is foolish work? What the
difference between sense and nonsense, in daily occupation?
Well, wise work is, briefly, work _with_ God. Foolish work is work
_against_ God. And work done with God, which He will help, may be
briefly described as 'Putting in Order'--that is, enforcing God's law of
order, spiritual and material, over men and things. The first thing you
have to do, essentially; the real 'good work' is, with respect to men,
to enforce justice, and with respect to things, to enforce tidiness, and
fruitfulness. And against these two great human deeds, justice and
order, there are perpetually two great demons contending,--the devil of
iniquity, or inequity, and the devil of disorder, or of death; for death
is only consummation of disorder. You have to fight these two fiends
daily. So far as you don't fight against the fiend of iniquity, you work
for him. You 'work iniquity,' and the judgment upon you, for all your
'Lord, Lord's,' will be 'Depart from me, ye that work iniquity.' And so
far as you do not resist the fiend of disorder, you work disorder, and
you yourself do the work of Death, which is sin, and has for its wages,
Death himself.
Observe then, all wise work is mainly threefold in character. It is
honest, useful, and cheerful.
I. It is HONEST. I hardly know anything more strange than that you
recognise honesty in play, and you do not in work. In your lightest
games, you have always some one to see what you call 'fair-play.' In
boxing, you must hit fair; in racing, start fair. Your English watchword
is fair-play, your English hatred, foul-play. Did it ever strike you
that you wanted another watchword also, fair-work, and another hatred
also, foul-work? Your prize-fighter has some honour in him yet; and so
have the men in the ring round him: they will judge him to lose the
match, by foul hitting. But your prize-merchant gains his match by foul
selling, and no one cries out against that. You drive a gambler out of
the gambling-room who loads dice, but you leave a tradesman in
flourishing business, who loads scales! For observe, all dishonest
dealing _is_ loading scales. What does it matter whether I get short
weight, adulterate substance, or dishonest fabric? The fault in the
fabric is incomparably the worst of the two. Give me short measure of
food, and I only lose by you; but give me adulterate food, and I die by
you. Here, then, is your chief duty, you workmen and tradesmen--to be
true to yourselves, and to us who would help you. We can do nothing for
you, nor you for yourselves, without honesty. Get that, you get all;
without that, your suffrages, your reforms, your free-trade measures,
your institutions of science, are all in vain. It is useless to put your
heads together, if you can't put your hearts together. Shoulder to
shoulder, right hand to right hand, among yourselves, and no wrong hand
to anybody else, and you'll win the world yet.
II. Then, secondly, wise work is USEFUL. No man minds, or ought to mind,
its being hard, if only it comes to something; but when it is hard, and
comes to nothing; when all our bees' business turns to spiders'; and
for honeycomb we have only resultant cobweb, blown away by the next
breeze--that is the cruel thing for the worker. Yet do we ever ask
ourselves, personally, or even nationally, whether our work is coming to
anything or not? We don't care to keep what has been nobly done; still
less do we care to do nobly what others would keep; and, least of all,
to make the work itself useful instead of deadly to the doer, so as to
use his life indeed, but not to waste it. Of all wastes, the greatest
waste that you can commit is the waste of labour. If you went down in
the morning into your dairy, and you found that your youngest child had
got down before you; and that he and the cat were at play together, and
that he had poured out all the cream on the floor for the cat to lap up,
you would scold the child, and be sorry the milk was wasted. But if,
instead of wooden bowls with milk in them, there are golden bowls with
human life in them, and instead of the cat to play with--the devil to
play with; and you yourself the player; and instead of leaving that
golden bowl to be broken by God at the fountain, you break it in the
dust yourself, and pour the human blood out on the ground for the fiend
to lick up--that is no waste! What! you perhaps think, 'to waste the
labour of men is not to kill them.' Is it not? I should like to know how
you could kill them more utterly--kill them with second deaths, seventh
deaths, hundredfold deaths? It is the slightest way of killing to stop a
man's breath. Nay, the hunger, and the cold, and the little whistling
bullets--our love-messengers between nation and nation--have brought
pleasant messages from us to many a man before now; orders of sweet
release, and leave at last to go where he will be most welcome and most
happy. At the worst you do but shorten his life, you do not corrupt his
life. But if you put him to base labour, if you bind his thoughts, if
you blind his eyes, if you blunt his hopes, if you steal his joys, if
you stunt his body, and blast his soul, and at last leave him not so
much as to reap the poor fruit of his degradation, but gather that for
yourself, and dismiss him to the grave, when you have done with him,
having, so far as in you lay, made the walls of that grave everlasting
(though, indeed, I fancy the goodly bricks of some of our family vaults
will hold closer in the resurrection day than the sod over the
labourer's head), this you think is no waste, and no sin!
III. Then, lastly, wise work is CHEERFUL, as a child's work is. And now
I want you to take one thought home with you, and let it stay with you.
Everybody in this room has been taught to pray daily, 'Thy kingdom
come.' Now, if we hear a man swear in the streets, we think it very
wrong, and say he 'takes God's name in vain.' But there's a twenty times
worse way of taking His name in vain, than that. It is to _ask God for
what we don't want_. He doesn't like that sort of prayer. If you don't
want a thing, don't ask for it: such asking is the worst mockery of your
King you can mock Him with; the soldiers striking Him on the head with
the reed was nothing to that. If you do not wish for His kingdom, don't
pray for it. But if you do, you must do more than pray for it; you must
work for it. And, to work for it, you must know what it is: we have all
prayed for it many a day without thinking. Observe, it is a kingdom that
is to come to us; we are not to go to it. Also, it is not to be a
kingdom of the dead, but of the living. Also, it is not to come all at
once, but quietly; nobody knows how. 'The kingdom of God cometh not with
observation.' Also, it is not to come outside of us, but in the hearts
of us: 'the kingdom of God is within you.' And, being within us, it is
not a thing to be seen, but to be felt; and though it brings all
substance of good with it, it does not consist in that: 'the kingdom of
God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy
Ghost:' joy, that is to say, in the holy, healthful, and helpful Spirit.
Now, if we want to work for this kingdom, and to bring it, and enter
into it, there's just one condition to be first accepted. You must enter
it as children, or not at all; 'Whosoever will not receive it as a
little child shall not enter therein.' And again, 'Suffer little
children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the
kingdom of heaven.'
_Of such_, observe. Not of children themselves, but of such as
children. I believe most mothers who read that text think that all
heaven is to be full of babies. But that's not so. There will be
children there, but the hoary head is the crown. 'Length of days, and
long life and peace,' that is the blessing, not to die in babyhood.
Children die but for their parents sins; God means them to live, but He
can't let them always; then they have their earlier place in heaven: and
the little child of David, vainly prayed for;--the little child of
Jeroboam, killed by its mother's step on its own threshold,--they will
be there. But weary old David, and weary old Barzillai, having learned
children's lessons at last, will be there too: and the one question for
us all, young or old, is, have we learned our child's lesson? it is the
_character_ of children we want, and must gain at our peril; let us see,
briefly, in what it consists.
The first character of right childhood is that it is Modest. A well-bred
child does not think it can teach its parents, or that it knows
everything. It may think its father and mother know everything,--perhaps
that all grown-up people know everything; very certainly it is sure that
_it_ does not. And it is always asking questions, and wanting to know
more. Well, that is the first character of a good and wise man at his
work. To know that he knows very little;--to perceive that there are
many above him wiser than he; and to be always asking questions, wanting
to learn, not to teach. No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or
governs well who wants to govern; it is an old saying (Plato's, but I
know not if his, first), and as wise as old.
Then, the second character of right childhood is to be Faithful.
Perceiving that its father knows best what is good for it, and having
found always, when it has tried its own way against his, that he was
right and it was wrong, a noble child trusts him at last wholly, gives
him its hand, and will walk blindfold with him, if he bids it. And that
is the true character of all good men also, as obedient workers, or
soldiers under captains. They must trust their captains;--they are bound
for their lives to choose none but those whom they _can_ trust. Then,
they are not always to be thinking that what seems strange to them, or