Doing Things Well.

M. WOOLSEY STRYKER, D.D., LL.D., President Hamilton College.

TH

morality of carelessness.

HE word well is allied to the word weal. It has the notion of will and of wish. It suggests both an ideal and a purpose. One might write a book upon the imWhoever consents to less than his thorough best is neither shrewd nor good. To do things by halves or thirds, to put only a part of one's self into the given task, whether the tool is a pen or a pick, is to add to the general bulk of unrighteousness.

The old sculptor who said of his carvings, whose backs were to be out of all possible inspection, "but the gods will see," touched this matter to the quick. A result which one passes for his honest best, and which he knows is not that, is a kind of counterfeit. This felony has its reflex penalty in the slow effacing of the capacity to excel. It reacts in the deterioration of those faculties which gain by exactions, and dwindle by indulgences. Skill is wit plus will. To accept conventional estimates, to excuse one's self by averages, to let facility cheat thoroughness, to intermit that stern self-censorship, which both fidelity and farsightedness command, is to be always an apprentice, and never a master.

This adroit shirking when it becomes deliberate, or even chronic, puts a period both to mental and moral growth. Putty will for a while cover a multitude of sins; but, whether men discover the ill doer or no, the sins of superficiality will find the man out and wreak their inward penalty by making his soul shallower.

The genuine man, whether his product is books or boots,

whether he works by the year or by the day, will not willingly sacrifice quality to quantity. He will value the idea that lies in that keen German proverb, "The good is enemy to the best," which is to say that the passable blinds us to the perfect, and that offering a medium result we come to be incapable of the maximum. The so-called "pretty good" thus becomes the very bad.

The men who renounce mediocrity and uplift the average of the world are such as are never complacent with any present performance, and who by the energy of a great ideal first grasp and then tread every rung of the ladder. When a genuine and capable nature apprehends that slovenly performance is positively depraved, and that individuality is only another term for exceptional devotion to some line of effort, there breaks upon him vertical light.

Such a vision of what is possible to faithfulness and determination, will, if it is adopted into purpose, exorcise lethargy, indecision, procrastination, and all their fellow devils. The little idols of seeming and getting and all the inane pantheon will fall before the right-angled determination to do and never to be satisfied with half doing.

"Heartily know

That the half gods go

When the gods arrive."

Doing well does not mean that we are to pause because we have done as well as another, nor because yet another's best is to us at present inaccessible.

It is not a relative but an absolute well-doing that God and men have a right to require at our hands. However, that is a noble discouragement which gauges its progress up by the topmost rather than midmost competitor. I have always found help in a wise paragraph of Richard C. Trench—“Fit, square, polish thyself. Thy turn will come. Thou wilt not lie in the way. The builders will have need of thee. The wall has more need of thee than thou hast of the wall."

"Seconds" may go cheap; but there is always a market for prime men. It will be found in the long run, and often in the short dash, that there is nothing more practical than a high and relentless ideal. And the ultimate and inestimable reward of work well done is the answer of a man's own soul in deep approval. Self-respect attends the outlay of one's total energy for worthy ends. The mere hireling, whether carpenter or king, is one who never tastes the pure springs of manliness. The solid soul who writes not alone on a crest, but on his heart, ich dien, attains "a peace above all earthly dignities." "In the morning," says Marcus Aurelius, "when thou art sluggish at rousing thee, let this thought be present, 'I am rising to a man's work.""

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And the Sage of sages speaks yet as he spake through the seer of Patmos, "I know thy works." His "well done" will be the recognition and reward of all true men.