SUCCESS AT YOUR DOORSTEPS: What You Can Do With Your Will Power, The Key to Success, Acres of Diamonds, Praying for Money & Every Man His Own University. Russell Conwell
he began to whine and yelp—and stopped, whirled around, and, rushing down to the brook, put his nose under the water. From the time he graduated from that pepper university he never would follow a fox at all. He had added education in the wrong direction, and so it is often with these scientific men.
Do you know that the humblest man, whatever his occupation, really knows instinctively certain things better for not having been to school much? It is so easy to bias the mind.
When the boy comes to learn geometry the teacher will say: "Two parallel lines will never run together." The boy may look up and ask, "What is the use of telling me that?" Every man knows that two parallel lines will never run together. But how does he know it? It is born with him. His natural instincts tell that to him. It is what we call "an axiom"—a self-evident truth. It is above argument and beyond all possible reasoning. We know that "two halves are equal to the whole"! You know that when you cut an apple in half the two halves are equal to the whole of it. You tell that to a geometry class, and they say: "I know that. Everybody knows it." Of course everybody does, because it is a natural scientific fact that you cannot reasonably question.
Ask a man, "Do you know that you exist?" He looks with astonishment and says: "Certainly! Don't I know that I am? I know that I am here, that this is me, that I am not Mrs. Smith or some one else?"
Of course you do. But how do you know it? By a God-given instinct that came into the world with you.
No scientist or school on earth could disprove that, or prove it, either. It is a self-evident fact. I know that I am an intelligent personal identity, and that I dwell in this body in some mysterious way. I know that is my hand, but what I possess is not me. I know by an instinct infallible that I am a spiritual being, separate from this material. You know that. No scientist can prove or disprove it. It is a fact we all know. I know that I can never die, and you know it unless you have gotten educated out of it. It is in your very life; it is a part of your original instinct.
When some graduate of some great university shall come to you, young man, and say, "I can prove to you that the Bible is not true," or, "I can prove to you that your religion is false," you can say to him: "You are nothing but an educated fool. Because the more you have studied the less truth you seem to know."
It is only one's own personal self that can know his own religious instincts. It is only himself that can know whether he is in spiritual relation to God or not. No education on earth can overturn the fact, although wrong study may confuse the mind.
When a man comes to me, with his higher education, to overturn religion, it reminds me of what Artemus Ward said to that lordly graduate of Oxford and Cambridge. This man told Ward that he was disgusted with his shows. Artemus Ward asked him, "What do you know about these shows?" and he said: "I know everything about them. I graduated from two universities." Then Artemus Ward said, "You remind me of a farmer in Maine who had a calf that stole the milk of two cows, and the more milk he got the greater calf he was." Such is the effect sometimes of education on religious life—the more mental education of some kind which you get the less you may know about your natural religious instincts.
There is a great need to-day, and prayers go up to heaven now for men and women whom mankind shall love—love because they are great benefactors; love because, while they are making money or gaining fame or honor for themselves, they are blessing humanity all the way along. I must not argue now. I will illustrate, because you can remember the illustrations and you might forget an argument.
There is a great need for artists. There never was such a need in the progress of Christian civilization as there is now for great painters. All these walls ought to be covered with magnificent paintings teaching some great divine truth, and every school-house, yes, every barn, ought to have some picture upon it that will instruct and inspire. All our children seek to go to the moving pictures, and that shows what an agency there is in pictures for the instruction of mankind. We need artists by the thousands. It is not a surprise to me that a New York man is getting a salary of $35,000 a year for moving-picture work because "he notices something other people have not seen." It is no surprise that a great store in that city pays an advertising man $21,000 a year salary. He can see what the rest of the public does not see.
We need great artists, hundreds of them. Where are you going to find them? You will say "at the art school, in the National Gallery in London, or at the Louvre in Paris, or in Rome." Well, it may be that you will. But it is an unfortunate thing for your theory that one of the greatest painters in America painted with a cat's tail. It is another enlightening thing that the man who received the highest prize at the World's Fair in Chicago for a landscape painting never took "a lesson" in color or drawing in his life.
But that doesn't argue against lessons nor against schools or universities. Don't misunderstand me in this. I am only making emphatic my special subject.
He took the highest prize and never went to an art school in his life. If he had attended school the teacher might have tried to show him something and thus weakened his mind. The teacher in a school who shows a child anything that that child could work out for himself is a curse to that child. It is an awful calamity for a child to be under the control of a too kind-hearted teacher who will show him everything.
One of the greatest artists was Charlotte Brontë. She was a wonderful little woman, and I like little women. Did you ever read Longfellow's poem on "Little Women"? It always reminds me so much of Charlotte Brontë. One day he showed me the poem, and I asked him why he did not print it in his book, and he replied, "I don't think it is worth while." Since his death they have given it first rank, and I will quote one verse:
As within a little rose we find the richest dyes,
As in a little grain of gold much price and value lies,
And as from a little balsam much odor doth arise,
So in a little woman there's a gleam of paradise.
Charlotte Brontë was one of those wonderful, wiry, beautiful little cultivated combinations of divine femininity which no man can describe. She had a younger brother on her hands, and when a young woman has a younger brother on her hands if she has a beau, she has her hands full. This younger brother was dull of brains, clumsy of finger and unfitted to be an artist. But his sister was determined he should be a painter, and took him to the shore, to the village and the woods, and said, "Notice everything, and notice it closely." Finally, he did secure a second prize. Then his little sister threw her arms about her brother's neck and kissed him, and thanked him for getting that prize. That is just like a woman! I never could understand a woman. Of all the mysterious things that the Lord ever put together, a woman is the most mysterious. Charlotte Brontë was like an old lady I used to know up in my native town who thanked her husband, with tears, for having brought up a flock of sheep which she herself fed every morning through the winter before he was out of bed.
Finally, Charlotte Brontë's younger brother became dissipated and died, and then her father died, and when we ministers get to be old we might as well die. She was left without means of support. But when she told her friends, they said: "You have a college education, Charlotte. Why don't you write something?" We now find that the first thing she wrote was "Jane Eyre," the wonderful story for which she at last received $38,000. Queen Victoria invited that humble girl to her palace at Windsor because of her marvelous genius.
How came she to write a book like that? Simply because she had noticed so closely, for her brother's sake, that from the nib of her pen flowed those beautiful descriptions as naturally as the water ripples down the mountain-side. That is always so. No man ever gives himself for others' good in the right spirit without receiving "a hundredfold more in this present time."
I will go one step farther with this thought. We do need great painters, but we don't want more painters like that man who painted the Israelites coming out of Egypt, representing them with muskets on their shoulders with U.S. on the butts.
But more than artists we need great musicians. There is an awful need of music. We have too much noise, but very little real music. Did you ever think how little you have? Do you suppose a true musician is simply a man who roars down to low B and squeals to high C? What an awful need there is of the music which refines the heart, brightens the mind;