The Greatest Thing In the World : Part 3

Architects of Fate: Steps to Success and Power
By Orison Swett Marden

(Page 13 of 23)

Among the slain on the battlefield at Fredericksburg was the body of a youth upon which was found next the heart a photograph of Lincoln. Upon the back of it were these words: "God bless President Lincoln." The youth had been sentenced to death for sleeping at his post, but had been pardoned by the President.

David Dudley Field said he considered Lincoln the greatest man of his day. Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and others were great, each in one way, but Lincoln was great in many ways. There seemed to be hidden springs of greatness in this man that would gush forth in the most unexpected way. The men about him were at a loss to name the order of his genius. Horace Greeley was almost as many-sided, but was a wonderful combination of goodness and weakness, while Lincoln seemed strong in every way. After Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation he said, "The promise must now be kept; I should never recall one word."

Bishop Hamilton, of Salisbury, bears the following testimony to the influence for good which Gladstone, when a school-fellow at Eton, exercised upon him. "I was a thoroughly idle boy; but I was saved from worse things by getting to know Gladstone." At Oxford we are told the effect of his example was so strong that men who followed him there ten years later declare "that undergraduates drank less in the forties because Gladstone had been so courageously abstemious in the thirties."

The Rev. John Newton said, "I see in this world two heaps of human happiness and misery; now if I can take but the smallest bit from one heap and add it to the other, I carry a point; if as I go home a child has dropped a half-penny, and by giving it another I can wipe away its tears, I feel I have done something."

A holy hermit, who had lived for six years in a cave of the Thebaid, fasting, praying, and performing severe penances, spending his whole life in trying to make himself of some account with God, that he might be sure of a seat in Paradise, prayed to be shown some saint greater than himself, in order that he might pattern after him to reach still greater heights of holiness. The same night an angel came to him and said, "If You wouldst excel all others in virtue and sanctity, strive to imitate a certain minstrel who goes begging and singing from door to door." The hermit, much chagrined, sought the minstrel and asked him how he had managed to make himself so acceptable to God. The minstrel hung down his head and replied, "Do not mock me, holy father; I have performed no good works, and I am not worthy to pray.

I only go from door to door to amuse people with my viol and my flute." The hermit insisted that he must have done some good deeds. The minstrel replied, "Nay, I know of nothing good that I have done." "But how hast You become a beggar? Hast You spent thy substance in riotous living?" "Nay, not so," replied the minstrel. "I met a poor woman running hither and thither, distracted, because her husband and children had been sold into slavery to pay a debt. I took her home and protected her from certain sons of Belial, for she was very beautiful. I gave her all I possessed to redeem her family and returned her to her husband and children. Is there any man who would not have done the same?" The hermit shed tears, and said in all his life he had not done as much as the poor minstrel.

"A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favor than silver or gold."

A gentleman, traveling through West Virginia, went to a house, and procured food for himself and companion and their horses. He wanted to make payment, but the woman was ashamed to take pay for a mere act of kindness. He pressed the money upon her. Finally she said, "If you don't think I'm mean, I'll take one quarter of a dollar from you, so as to look at it now and then, for there has been no money in this house for a year."

Do not take the world's estimate of success. The real height of the Washington Monument is not measured between the capstone and the earth, but includes the fifty feet of solid masonry below. Many of the most successful lives are like the rivers of India which run under ground, unseen and unheard by the millions who tread above them. But have these rivers therefore no influence? Ask the rich harvest fields if they feel the flowing water beneath. The greatest worth is never measured. It is only the nearest stars whose distances we compute. That life whose influence can be measured by the world's tape-line of dollars and corn is not worth the measuring.

All the forces in nature that are the most powerful are the quietest. We speak of the rolling thunder as powerful; but gravitation, which makes no noise, yet keeps orbs in their orbits, and the whole system in harmony, binding every atom in each planet to the great center of all attraction, is ten thousand times ten thousand times more powerful. We say the bright lightning is mighty; so it is when it rends the gnarled oak into splinters, or splits solid battlements into fragments; but it is not half so powerful as the gentle light that comes so softly from the skies that we do not feel it, that travels at an inconceivable speed, strikes and yet is not felt, but exercises an influence so great that the earth is clothed with verdure through its influence, and all nature beautified and blessed by its ceaseless action. The things that make no noise, make no pretension, may be really the strongest. The most conclusive logic that a preacher uses in the pulpit will never exercise the influence that the consistent piety of character will exercise over all the earth.

The old Sicilian story relates how Pythias, condemned to death through the hasty anger of Dionysius of Syracuse, asked that he might go to his native Greece, and arrange his affairs, promising to return before the time appointed for his execution. The tyrant laughed his request to scorn, saying that when he was once safe out of Sicily no one would answer for his reappearance.

Copyright, 1895 by Orison Swett Marden.
All Rights Reserved.