Soulless wheels of destiny! say some. The blind mechanism of law! Ah, no, Jesus is the refutation of that. Law there is, and mechanism there must be. But neither blind nor soulless. For, above all, is the Father Love of God, and it is His spirit that is guiding and governing the wheels.
Wheels of Industry, Wheels of Change, Wheels of Destiny. And God’s Spirit in them all!
Prayer
O Lord our God, to whom not only the Church but our whole work-a-day world belongs, give us the purged sight that can see Thy tokens there. Deliver us from all foolish fear of changes since the goad moving all things onward is in our Father’s hand. And help us to be sure that whatsoever befalleth us and ours has been permitted and appointed by a Love that passeth knowledge. Amen.
III
A Triple Best
“The just shall live by faith.”
Romans 1:17
Some time ago I came across the life-motto of George Stephenson, the “father of the locomotive,” as he has been called, the man whose brains and sagacity made possible the network of railways which spreads now over the earth. The crystallised experience of such a life is worth studying. Here, then, was Stephenson’s working formula:—“Make the best of everything; think the best of everybody; hope the best for yourself.”
First, make the best of everything. In every set of circumstances possible or conceivable, there are always, at any rate, two ways of acting. You can look for the helpful, bright, and hopeful things, and “freeze on” to these meantime. Or, you can select all the doleful, sombre aspects, and sit down in the dust with them. Now, if it did not matter which a man did, there would be no good saying any more. But it has long since become abundantly clear that the man who makes the best of his circumstances, however hard they be, comes most happily out of them in the end. In other words, it pays to make the best of things. It is the cheery people who recover quickest when they are sick. There are men who, if their house should fall in ruins about them, will contrive some sort of shelter meantime with the broken beams! That is the type that wins out in the end somehow; these are the men to whom the miracles happen—who never know when they are beaten, who will face the most tremendous odds with “the half of a broken hope” for a shield, who are never done until they are dead. What makes for success or failure in a man is nothing external to him at all. It is something within him. It is the temper of his spirit. It is the way he captains his own soul.
The other day I saw a photograph of a backyard. It was a little bit of a place, of the most forlorn appearance, littered with tin cans, overgrown with weeds, and hemmed round with blank walls of brick. But it came into the hands of a man who believed in making the best of things. Another photograph showed that same backyard after a year had passed. It was still as small as ever, still overlooked by high walls and surrounded by chimneys. But it was now a perfect little oasis of beauty amid a wilderness of bricks and slates. Will anybody deny that that spirit pays?
Right up the scale, from little things to the highest things, the man who looks for the shining possibilities and follows them, is the man on whom, in our shortsighted way, we say that Fortune smiles. Rather, he smiles in such a determined way to Fortune, that she has at length to smile back!
Nobody pretends that it is easy, when we have failed, to gather our powers together and try again. But nearly all the big men have had to do that very thing. It certainly is not easy, when you have a heavy burden of your own, to spare a cheery word or a hand of sympathy for somebody who is really much better off, but there are plenty of people doing it at this moment. Nero’s palace is the last place in this world where you would expect to find a company of loyal Christian folk. Yet there were such people there, “the saints of Caesar’s household.” And the grace of God that made that possible can achieve all these lesser wonders too.
Second, think the best of everybody. There is a winsome legend that Jesus once revealed Himself in this way:—A knot of idlers had gathered in the street round a dead dog. One remarked how mangy and unkempt its hide was. Another said, “What ugly ears!” But a stranger, who had come forward, said, “Pearls are not whiter than its teeth!” And men said to one another, “This must be Jesus of Nazareth, for nobody but He would find something good even in a dead dog.” Certainly it is the mark of the most Christlike men and women that they delight rather in emphasising the merest speck of goodness than in denouncing the too visible evil. We can, all too easily, see the fault in another. What we cannot see is the heart of the defaulter, the weight of temptation he struggled under, and his bitter inner penitence. “Granted,” as Carlyle says, “the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy. He has not been all-wise and all-powerful. But, to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.”
The way to get the best out of people is to think the best about them. Let a man see that you have good hopes of him,
