From “The Crown of Wild Olives.” Conclusion of the first lecture.

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.

  It is honest. I hardly know anything more strange than that you recognize 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 honor 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.

  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 labor. 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 labor 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? 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 labor, 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 laborer’s head), this you think is no waste, and no sin!

  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 wrong in what they are desired to do, is strange or wrong. They know their captain: where he leads they must follow, what he bids they must do; and without this trust and faith, without this captainship and soldiership, no great deed, no great salvation, is possible to man. Among all the nations it is only when this faith is attained by them that they become great; the Jew, the Greek, and the Mahometan agree at least in testifying to this. It was a deed of this absolute trust which made Abraham the father of the faithful; it was the declaration of the power of God as captain over all men, and the acceptance of a leader appointed by him as commander of the faithful, which laid the foundation of whatever national power yet exists in the East; and the deed of the Greeks, which has become the type of unselfish and noble soldiership to all lands, and to all times, was commemorated, on the tomb of those who gave their lives to do it, in the most pathetic, so far as I know, or can feel, of all human utterances: “O stranger, go and tell our people that we are lying here, having obeyed their words.”

  Then the third character of right childhood is to be Loving and Generous. Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back. It loves everything near it, when it is a right kind of child—would hurt nothing, would give the best it has away, always, if you need it—does not lay plans for getting everything in the house for itself, and delights in helping people; you cannot please it so much as by giving it a chance of being useful, in ever so little a way.

  And because of all these characters, lastly, it is Cheerful. Putting its trust in its father, it is careful for nothing—being full of love to every creature, it is happy always, whether in its play or in its duty. Well, that’s the great worker’s character also. Taking no thought for the morrow; taking thought only for the duty of the day; trusting somebody else to take care of to-morrow; knowing, indeed, what labor is, but not what sorrow is; and always ready for play,—beautiful play,—for lovely human play is like the play of the Sun. There’s a worker for you. He, steady to his time, is set as a strong man to run his course, but, also, he rejoiceth as a strong man to run his course. See how he plays in the morning, with the mists below, and the clouds above, with a ray here and a flash there, and a shower of jewels everywhere;—that’s the Sun’s play; and great human play is like his—all various—all full of light and life, and tender, as the dew of the morning.

  So then, you have the child’s character in these four things: Humility, Faith, Charity, and Cheerfulness. That’s what you have got to be converted to. “Except ye be converted and become as little children”—You hear much of conversion nowadays; but people always seem to think you have got to be made wretched by conversion,—to be converted to long faces. No, friends, you have got to be converted to short ones; you have to repent into childhood, to repent into delight, and delightsomeness. You can’t go into a conventicle but you’ll hear plenty of talk of backsliding. Backsliding, indeed! I can tell you, on the ways most of us go, the faster we slide back the better. Slide back into the cradle, if going on is into the grave—back, I tell you; back—out of your long faces, and into your long clothes. It is among children only, and as children only, that you will find medicine for your healing and true wisdom for your teaching. There is poison in the counsels of the man of this world; the words they speak are all bitterness, “the poison of asps is under their lips,” but “the sucking child shall play by the hole of the asp.” There is death in the looks of men. “Their eyes are privily set against the poor”; they are as the uncharmable serpent, the cockatrice, which slew by seeing. But “the weaned child shall lay his hand on the cockatrice den.” There is death in the steps of men; “their feet are swift to shed blood; they have compassed us in our steps like the lion that is greedy of his prey, and the young lion lurking in secret places,” but, in that kingdom, the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and the fatling with the lion, and “a little child shall lead them.” There is death in the thoughts of men; the world is one wide riddle to them, darker and darker as it draws to a close; but the secret of it is known to the child, and the Lord of heaven and earth is most to be thanked in that “he has hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and has revealed them unto babes.” Yes, and there is death—infinitude of death in the principalities and powers of men. As far as the east is from the west, so far our sins are—not set from us, but multiplied around us: the Sun himself, think you he now “rejoices” to run his course, when he plunges westward to the horizon, so widely red, not with clouds, but blood? And it will be red more widely yet. Whatever drought of the early and latter rain may be, there will be none of that red rain. You fortify yourselves against it in vain; the enemy and avenger will be upon you also, unless you learn that it is not out of the mouths of the knitted gun, or the smoothed rifle, but “out of the mouths of babes and sucklings” that the strength is ordained, which shall “still the enemy and avenger.”