Sometimes we think men are great because of special native ability, or because of favorable opportunities which have come to them, or because of the times in which they lived and worked. There is no question but that native ability does greatly help to make success possible. Equal opportunities do not come alike to all; and times and events have changed many a man's life, and made possible a career that has crowned his days with honors which would not have come to him had he not been on hand when the opportunity arrived.
Education also greatly aids in making success possible when the day to do things has come. But more important than any or all of these, there must be within man the vision to see the need, and the courage and strength to fill the place and do the work. Most of our denominational work demands the highest type of mentality. Physical strength is good and must be cultivated; but mental strength and training are also important. Frequently men start well, then dwindle down to approximate failure because they cease to study. Few things make heavier demands on self-discipline than self-improvement. In order to keep fresh and do one's best, there must be hard work.
To show that busy men and great men work hard, let me cite from a biography of Theodore Roosevelt:
"Incessant and exacting as were the official activities of the President during the first two years of his service, he still was able to find time for a really extraordinary amount of miscellaneous reading, as the following letter, under date of November 4, 1903, to Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, shows:
" 'You remember speaking to me about reading, and especially about the kind of books one ought to read. On my way back from Oyster Bay on election day I tried to jot down the books I have been reading for the past two years. . . . Of course, I have forgotten a great many, . . . and I have also read much in the magazines. Moreover, more than half of the books are books which I have read before. These I did not read through, but simply took out the parts I liked. . . . With this preliminary explanation, here goes!
"'Parts of Herodotus; the first and seventh books of Thucydides; all of Polybius; a little of Plutarch; Jschylus's "Orestean Trilogy," and the "Seven Against Thebes;" Euripides' "Hippolytus and Bacch," and Aristophanes' "Frogs;" parts of the "Politics" of Aristotle (all of these were in translation) ; Ridgeway's "Early Age of Greece:" Wheeler's "Life of Alexander;" some six volumes of Mahaffey's "Studies of the Greek World"—of which I only read chapters here and there; two of Maspero's volumes on the Early Syrian, Chaldean, and Egyptian civilizations—these I read superficially; several chapters of Froissart; the "Memoirs" of Marbot; Bain's "Life of Charles the Twelfth;" Mahan's "Types of Naval Officers;" some of Macaulay's Essays; three or four volumes of Gibbon; three or four chapters of Motley; the "Life of Prince Eugene," of Admiral de Ruyter, of Turenne, and of Sobieski (all in French); the Battles in Carlyle's "Frederick the Great;" Hay and Nicolay's "Lincoln," and the two volumes of Lincoln's "Speeches and Writings"—these I have not only read through, but have read parts of them again and again; Bacon's "Essays"—curiously enough, I had really never read these until this year; Mrs. Roosevelt has a volume which belonged to her grandfather, which she always carries around with her, and I got started reading this; "Macbeth;" "Twelfth Night;" "Henry IV;" "Henry V:" "Richard II;" the first two cantos of "Paradise Lost;" some of Michael Drayton's poems—there are only three or four I care for; portions of "Nibelungenlied;" portions of Carlyle's translation of Dante's "Inferno;" Church's "Beowulf ;" Morris's translation of the "Helms. kringla," and Dasent's translation of the "Sagas of Gisli and Burnt Njal;" Lady Gregory's and Miss Hull's "Cuchulain Saga," together with the "Children of Lir," the "Children of Tuirenn," the "Tale of Deirdre," etc.; the "Preciouses Ridicules," "Le Barbier de Seville;" most of Jusserand's books—of which I was most interested in his studies of the "King's Quhair;" Holmes's "Over the Teacups;" Lounsbury's "Shakespeare and Voltaire;" various numbers of the Edinburgh Review from 1803 to 1850; Tolstoi's "Sebastopol and the Cossacks;" Sinkiewicz's "Fire and Sword," and parts of his other volumes; "Guy Mnimerhig-;." the "Antiquary:" "Rob Roy;" "Waverly;" "Quentin Durward;" parts of "Marmion" and the "Lay of the Last Minstrel;" Cooper's "Pilot;" some of the earlier stories and some of the poems of Bret Harte; Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer;" "Pickwick Papers;" "Nicholas Nickleby;" "Vanity Fair;" "Pendennis;" "The Newcomes;" "The Adventures of Philip;" Conan Doyle's "White Company;" Lever's "Charles O'Malley;" "Romances of Brockden Brown" I read when I was confined to my room with a game leg, for motives of curiosity and no real enjoyment; an occasional half hour's reading in Keats, Browning, Poe, Tennyson, Longfellow, Kipling, Bliss Carman; also in Poe's "Tales" and Lowell's "Essays;" some of Stevenson's stories, and of Allingham's "British Ballads;" Wagner's "Simple Life."
"'I have read aloud to the children, and often finished afterward to myself, "The Rose and the Ring;" Hans Andersen; some of Grimm; some of "Norse Folk Tales;" stories by Howard Pyle; "Uncle Remus" and the rest of Joel Chandler Harris's stories (incidentally, I would be willing to rest all that I have done in the South as regards the Negro in his story "Free Joe"). Two or three books by Jacob Riis; also Mrs. Van Vorst's "Woman Who Toils," and one or two similar volumes; the "Nonsense Verses" of Carolyn Wells, first to the children and afterward to Mrs. Roosevelt and myself; Kenneth Grahame's "Golden Age;" those two delightful books by Somerville and Ross, "All on the Irish Shore," and "Experiences of an Irish M. P.;" Townsend's "Europe and Asia;" Conrad's "Youth;" "Phoenixiana;" "Artemus Ward;" Octava Thanet's stories, which I always like when they deal with labor problems; various books on the Boer War, of which I like best Viljoen's, Stevens', and "Studies" by the writer signing himself Linesman; Pike's "Through the Sun-Arctic Forest," and Peer's "Cross Country with Horse and Hound;" together with a number of books on big game hunting, mostly in Africa; several volumes on American outdoor life and natural history, including the reading of much of John Burroughs; Swettenham's "Real Malay;" David Gray's "Gallops;" Miss Stewart's "Napoleon Jackson;" Janvier's "Passing of Thomas and Other Stories;" "The Benefactors;" "People of the Whirlpool;" London's "Call of the Wild;" Fox's "Little Shepherd of Kingdom Comes;" Hamlin Garland's "Captain of the Gray Horse Troop;" Tarkington's "Gentleman From Indiana;" Churchill's "Crisis;" Remington's "John Ermine of the Yellowstone;" Wister's "Virginian," "Red Men and White," "Philosophy Four," and "Lin McLean;" White's "Blazed Trail," "Conjurer's House," and "Claim Jumpers;" Trevelyan's "American Revolution." Often I would read one book by chance, and it would suggest another.
" 'There! That is the catalogue; about as interesting as Homer's catalogue of the Ships, and with about as much method in it as there seems in a superficial glance to be in an Irish stew"' —"Theodore Roosevelt and His Time," Vol. I, by Joseph Bucklin Bishop, pp. 265-268.
If an active President of the United States can read in two years the foregoing books, it does look like a "baby cry" to affirm that we workers are too busy to read five Reading Course books in twelve months!
Not long ago I heard one of our workers tell another that while on the way to and from the Fall Council held in Omaha, and while in attendance at that meeting, he had read "The Son of Man," 300 pages, by Emil Ludwig; "The Man Nobody Knows," 218 pages, by Bruce Barton; "Rivers of Living Water," 108 pages, by L. E. Froom; a work on the history of religions, 334 pages; a work on characters, of nearly 400 pages; a few chapters in a history of philosophy; many poems by Tennyson, Lowell, Wordsworth, and other authors; part of the October Current History; two issues of the Literary Digest; and a daily paper. This was in addition to daily Bible reading and faithful attendance at the meetings. Surely it is possible for most of our workers to read much more than a half dozen books in a year!
