The Sunday Eight O'Clock

Front matter

The Sunday Eight O'ClockBrief Sermons for the UndergraduateByThomas Arkle Clark Dean of Men, University of IllinoisUrbana Illini Publishing Company 1916

Copyright, 1916 by Illini Publishing Co. Printed November, 1916

Introduction

PROBABLY most of the readers of these brief homilies will close the book with a smile at the little foibles or serious faults of their brother men, possibly known to them by name, at whom the gentle criticisms are pointed. Most of us will believe that we have long ago been promoted from the primer of conduct. We can enjoy the reminiscences of our youthful shortcomings called up by these chapters; the humor, the style, the human sympathy and charity that make for a better common understanding, they all appeal to us. And yet few will fail to admit, quite tacitly no doubt, that we too share the weaknesses of those who inspired the sermons, and that we can use the advice.

They are inspired indeed. For they are all documents of real experience; behind each is at least one episode fresh from the life of college students, which is quite like the life of mankind in general. The simple, homely truths of existence, the lessons of human intercourse here told us, the sound and helpful and kindly advice are not new in the world, but they must be taught over and over again, and they have not often been 80 well expressed. Because they have been well told, made real and vivid and impressive to the readers of the Daily Illini of the University of Illinois where they have appeared every Sunday for the past year or so, it has seemed desirable that they should be preserved.

Probably no one person needs the guidance or advice offered by many of these little sermons; one might react unfortunately to a reading of all of them at a sitting. But every one of them has gone home to some readers. Many of them have had surprising results. Within a few days after "The Uncertain Mail" first appeared no fewer than forty guilty consciences sought pardon from the Dean. They had never known that courteous but unsolicited notes should be answered, or they had meant to write, but . . . . And how many, secretly and ashamed, made new resolutions, not because of this one reminder only, but of others as well?

I recall the interested surprise with which Dean Clark told me of the elderly man who called, after reading one of these, to ask what was clearly to him an embarrassingly personal question.

"Dean Clark", he said, "I've lived a long while, and have eaten baked potatoes with a spoon as long as I can remember. I am chagrined, but helpless, as I read your reference to that practice of mine. How then should I eat a baked potato?"

Not all of us will be willing thus candidly to admit how often our foibles are illuminated in the pages of this book.

Frank W. Scott

November, 1916

The Day's Work

I SUPPOSE it seems pretty tough to have to get back to hard work," a freshman said to me as we were sitting together on the train that was bringing me back to the University from a summer of sight-seeing and freedom from office routine. What I said in reply is perhaps beside the mark, but the fact, and my text, remains that the day's work for each of us should have our interest and our best efforts, should bring us a measure of joy, and should not be delayed or done badly because of past pleasures or present allurements.

The boy entering college is likely to have at first a misconception as to what for him the real work of the day is. He has but recently broken away from the attachments and duties of home, and he often falls into a maelstrom of attractions at college. It is not strange, often, that he should frequently see things out of proportion, and that he should not at once recognize the fact that for him the real day's work is his college work—the assignments which from day to day he will jot down in a friendly note book, as they come from the lips of his various instructors. Other things may be important, but they are only incidental.

A few months ago I saw a body of Scotch Highlanders—five thousand of them—marching away to war. They were farmers, clerks, laboring men of all sorts who had left their regular work, their friends and their families to take up the business of war. Most of them have since met death upon a foreign shore. For many of them there was much joy and comfort and love left behind; for all of them there was sacrifice and privation and the danger of death ahead. But all of these hardships were for them a part of the day's work, and they were going to it with firmness and courage and with faces set. No doubt their minds were filled with the thoughts of the friends they were leaving behind; they would have been something less than human if they had not thought occasionally of the danger ahead; but whatever they thought or felt there was fight in their eyes, and they marched straight ahead, to the accomplishment of their tasks.

It is with that sort of spirit that the freshman should go to his work. Every day will have its special tasks; these should be done and done within the time assigned for them. He will not always find them easy or pleasant. The soldiers that I saw were carrying guns that, no doubt, galled their shoulders, and heavy knapsacks that seemed like an Old Man of the Sea about their necks; their feet were often blistered and sore, but they marched on; the day's work had to be done.

A young man said to me not long ago in explaining his failures of last year: "My work was very difficult, and I could not get interested in it, so I shirked it." Such a man would make a poor soldier, just as he made a poor student. Whatever your day's work is you should go to it with courage and vigor. If it is difficult you will get so much the more training out of it if you manage to do it. If it is not to your liking so much the more to your credit if you do it well. All sorts of things will call you away from it, some of them very good in themselves—physical and social pleasures, the picture shows, your new-made friends—but so far as they take your mind off the real business of the day they are bad. The day's work must be done.

And you will find as you address yourself manfully to the task of doing your college work that gradually it will grow easier, gradually your interest and your pleasure in it will increase, and finally you will come, as most men do who have chosen wisely, to look forward to it with real pleasure and to leave it with regret.

September

The Freshman

I WAS sitting in the office at the close of a tiresome registration week when he came in shyly and apologetically. He was a freshman, two thousand miles from home, he said, and he was sick—too sick to study, too sick to eat.

I inquired as to his symptoms, but they were indefinite, elusive. He was suffering, but his pain was not "localized" as the physicians say. As I suggested remedies, other troubles presented themselves, until finally he broached the subject of going home, and I knew he was homesick. I fixed him up—no matter how. The main point of the story is that he stuck; he fought it out as every manly boy does. He is an instructor now teaching other freshmen, and very likely has forgotten the whole circumstance.

If in all the disorder and confusion of the new duties and the new scenes incident to the opening of college some lonesome freshman has felt the call of home, there is nothing in that to be ashamed of. Perhaps those who have not had these feelings are less to be commended than those who have. It is rather a credit than otherwise to be in love with home.

Before long, if you keep at it, the interest in your daily work will develop, the thing which seemed so chaotic and confused will resolve itself into the orderly and the familiar; friends will spring up, pleasant associations will be formed—associations almost as pleasant, perhaps, as those you had at home, and the pain and the longing will grow less. As I recall them now, the boys who have grown homesick have usually been those who have cared most for the ideals and the principles of home; they have been good boys who, if they stayed, have developed into strong men.

Some day not far distant as you catch a glimpse of a newly formed friend across the green quadrangle stretching in front of University Hall, or as you see "Bart" kick a difficult goal on Illinois Field or Pogue carry the ball across the line for a touchdown, a wave of feeling will rush over you, and you will realize that you are a part of it all, and that it is your college and your campus, and your team, and that it is home here, and you love it.

And the homesick feeling will be gone.

September

Stung

I WAS ten, I suppose, and the pup and I were wandering across the dry stubble of prairie grass. I was picking my way cautiously in a vain endeavor to save my bare feet from the sharp ends of the dead weeds. The pup—young, curious, and unsophisticated—was making wide excursions in all directions, searing up flocks of quails or nosing in a gopher's hole. I was carrying a jug of water to the men in the hay field; the pup was intent on new experiences.

We had not gone far until we came upon a bumble bees' nest buried under the prairie sod. The bees were not in a good humor.

They were buzzing about petulantly, and, remembering former experiences, I veered to one side. The pup was fascinated. He showed interest, but with head erect he kept at first at a safe distance. Then, his curios- ity getting the better of him, he drew nearer. A hoary obese bumble bee made a pass at him, and he ran yelping to me.

The temptation to see something new was too great for him, however, and not heeding my voice, he went slowly back, stuck his nose into the hole, and was stung.

It was a sad little pup, with a limp tail and a wry distorted countenance, that trotted dejectedly and thoughtfully at my heels as we wended our way back from the hay fields. He had sought and found adventure, he had seen the world, he had had experience, but he had paid dearly for it.

His is an experience not confined to young and venturesome dogs. It is characteristic of youth. The young fellow just entering college—curious, eager, unsophisticated, full of vitality—finds it hard to avoid the bumble bees' nest. There is the temptation to grow wise, to see a little of life, to approach near enough to these untried dangers to satisfy curiosity and yet not to be stung. Few boys Stung expect to come out of these derelict excursions any the worse for the experience; they want only to see; but he is the rare exception who does not ultimately feel the sting of shame or disgrace, and physical pain.

The girl who is eager to be a good fellow, who is out for a lark, and who laughs at conventionalities, is running into the bumble bees' nest. She will hardly be able to keep herself from criticism, from vulgar cheap comment, from the sting of a tarnished reputation.

It is a foolish pup that sticks his nose into a bees' nest.

September

The Joiner

A DEAR old lady whom I once knew used to say in evidence of the fact that she had not wasted her eighty years, that she had never belonged to a club or been a member of a committee.

Hers was, perhaps, an extreme view to take, and one not likely to be accepted by the impulsive undergraduate. There is no doubt much to be said in favor of belonging to something. To do so may widen one's acquaintance and develop his initiative and increase his responsibility and his power of leadership, but whether it does or not very few fellows who are asked to join anything can find it in their hearts to refuse. It is a sort of flattery which we all fall for.

At this season of the year, however, when clubs are multiplying and lists of prospective members are being prepared, and the nets are being laid to ensnare the unsophisticated, it is possibly not unwise to sound a soft note of warning. The man who asks you to join something is like a promoter or an insurance solicitor or a book agent. He presents the invitation so skillfully that it seems like a rare privilege that one can not afford to slight, or the opportunity of a life time which one should not neglect. The prospect is alluring, but the cost is sometimes great.

One may belong to too many things. I know a number of undergraduates who belong to so many that they have time for nothing else. The joiner often has no time for his studies and no money to pay his regular bills. All his substance is wasted on his organizations, and all he has to show is a few flunks, some unpaid bills, and a collection of curiously designed pins.

Don't join anything that you haven't time to help, and don't join anything that can not be of some real service to you. A good many of our undergraduate organizations are groping about with the hope that they may ultimately find some real purpose for existing besides contributing to the support of fraternity jewelers and getting their photographs in the class annual. I am repeatedly besought to suggest some real object in life for a dozen different organizations which have not yet stumbled upon anything worth doing. Joining becomes with many fellows a fad and an obsession. It overshadows every other ambition and desire. It may be good to join something, but it is imbecility to join everything.

September

What?

WHEN I was an undergraduate in college and used to go home for the summer to work up a little physical enthusiasm on the farm, Cornelius O'Donnell, a shrewd old Irishman who lived down in the Dutch Flats and with whom we used to exchange work during harvest time, was wont regularly, after he had greeted me and inquired if I were "still down there in college," to propound the question, "Well, what are you goin' to make o' yourself?"

I am not sure that Cornelius thought that in the transformations that go on within college walls it is possible to construct a delicately wrought silk purse out of a sow's ear, but he had the feeling that any serious minded and reasonably intelligent young fellow who was willing to put in four years of good hard work could mould himself into any desired shape—could make out of himself, almost anything. And he was right.

I have wondered often as I have seen each year the hundreds of new men entering college, what their individual ambition is—what they want to make of themselves. I heard our President say not long ago that it is foolish for a man to waste his time in learning in college what he could pick up at the "Corners"; he should seek something worth while.

Some fellows are satisfied with small accomplishment in college—to be the best dancer on the campus, or the keenest fusser, or the most adroit pool player or the most notorious loafer, or, without scholastic excellence, to shine in some undergraduate activity. They are setting for themselves a low standard.

My old German teacher used to say that one can buy anything from the gods if one is willing to pay what it costs. It is possible, I believe, for every healthy young fellow to accomplish any reasonable ambition and to make himself about what he wishes. The price of such accomplishment is not infrequently high; it means high ideals, sacrifice, and hard work, and self-control, and self-discipline.

I come back to the old question. What are you going to make of yourself—you who are already some distance along the course? You have the materials and the opportunity to make almost anything you desire. You can become a rounder or a man of stable, reliable character; you can develop into a commonplace loafer who wastes his hours in, playing Kelly pool or penny ante, or you can become a real student who cultivates careful speech and broad interests and habits of self-control, and who does his daily task excellently.

It is up to you; you'll never again have so good a chance as now to make something of yourself.

September

The Snap

I'M looking for a three-hour course to fill up my program for next semester," Gregg said to me yesterday, "Do you know of any snap course?"

Before I answered him, my mind went back to commencement time. We were sitting on the porch talking it over, Frank and I, after the fellows had left. We had been celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of our graduation from college, and we had had three happy days together with the fellows, some of whom we had not seen since the day we parted after our commencement exercises. We had all been struck by the changes which had come to each of us, and naturally each one had swelled with satisfaction whenever some one intimated that he had changed little.

Mac had been in Arizona most of the time working cruelly hard in the mines; he was bald and seamed, and crippled with rheumatism. Pete's hair, which had been a riotous bunch of black curls, was entirely white. Fred, who had been slender and smooth cheeked showed a face that bore the mark of hard struggle and a physique that pulled the scales at twice the amount he could manage when he was a freshman. Ed seemed most like himself; brown haired, smooth faced, slender as a boy, he had changed least of all. Life had been a rather easy routine for him; he had not needed money; he had struggled little; he had developed little ambition; he entered only slightly into the reminiscences and the controversies which sprang up; he had no plans for the future, little thought of the past.

After they were all gone some way we decided that Fred had gripped us most of all. He had been a wild, untrained, harum scarum fellow, who cared little for God or for his instructors. He had brought himself to the front; he was the head of a big engineering plant; he had great ambitions for the future, and he was managing his men and his boys in a masterly way; best of all he had conquered himself, and all the wild passions that seemed to rage through him were under his control. His face showed character and conquest and self-mastery. You could tell by looking at him that he was strong and dependable. He had tried the hard thing and he had made good at it, while Ed was just as he used to be. He had got nowhere; he had no ambition to get anywhere. He had not sacrificed; he had not suffered, and for him there had been no development. And so as we thought it all over we decided that the man who had changed the most had done best. It is struggle that turns the hair gray and eats furrows into the face and bends the shoulders. All these suggest accomplishment and so are venerable and beautiful.

The man who is looking for the snap, for the soft job in college and out of it, is not likely to get anywhere; a passive unaggressive existence means weakness and stagnation.

"No," I said to Gregg, "I can't think of any snap courses."

September

Profanity

I RAN into Brown the other night about eight o'clock as I was com ing down Green Street. He was with two or three companions, well known men about the campus. It was a commonplace discussion that they were carrying on, but he was swearing profanely and loudly, mixing his oaths with vulgar gutter talk. I was not shocked, for as a boy I had been thrown with all conditions of the underworld—coal heavers and river rats, and ignorant section gangs, and I had heard the talk of the riff raff that follows a threshing outfit in the —but I was surprised.

You must not class Brown as the ordinary loud-mouthed underclassman. He is a senior who has an educated, religious father and a refined, gentle mother. At home Brown is himself an active member of the leading Protestant church, and sometimes at vacations he leads the Christian Endeavor meeting. At college he is a prominent man. He was wearing an "I" sweater when I met him, and he is a member of one of the best known organizations of upper classmen. He is not a coarse fellow; he has simply learned to swear as he learned in the grades to chew tobacco—because he thought it was smart and made him appear grown up. He swore at first to let people know, who would not otherwise have suspected it, what a young devil he was, and he swears now because he wants people to realize what an important character he is.

Of course, at home he doesn't swear at his mother or his father or his pastor or at any one or in the presence of any one whom he respects; and at college he is more or less careful who hears him. With his profanity he tries to impress his over-worked landlady and the laundry boy, and he awes under classmen who see a good deal of his swagger and hear a good deal of his profane talk.

It is a habit easily acquired but not so easily broken. Brown does not stop to think how coarse and vulgar and commonplace it makes him; how irreverent it is. Nor does he realize how every vulgar profane word he utters throws discredit upon his teachers and his father and his mother and himself.

"Every fellow does it" is the excuse offered if one ever stops to offer an excuse. It is a common vulgar fault, too common and vulgar in fact for the college man who has opportunities and training and who, if he is to get far in the world, should have ideals above the low and the profane.

October

The Uncertain Mail

I'VE seen a good deal in the newspapers from time to time with reference to the certainty that if you drop a letter into the mail box at the corner of your street, it will be delivered to the proper person; but I don't believe it.

I feel somewhat as Mark Twain said he did regarding the notice of his death which he read in a country newspaper; I think the reports have been greatly exaggerated. I've read something to the effect that not more than one letter out of a million ultimately goes astray, and that that one has a good chance of being run to cover by some epistolary sleuth in the dead letter office; but I've watched the thing, and I'll have to be shown.

I had a few hours of unexpected leisure one day last summer, and feeling more than ordinarily kindly toward the human race I used it to write to a few of the undergraduates who, it seemed to me, had done something that merited attention or was worthy of praise. When I had finished there were fifteen or twenty in all. The summer dragged on, and I was made happy by receiving two acknowledgments, one from McKinley, ashy little country freshman, and a gracious pleasant one from Bullard whom most people at first sight might have thought crude. I should scarcely have expected either to reply.

Now the thing that convinces me that all this talk about the reliability of the mails is wrong is the fact that I did not hear from those other eighteen letters.

Take Burton, for example, who won the western tennis championship. I'm sure that if he had received my congratulations, he would at least have acknowledged the note. He comes from a part of the country where they are fed on courtesy and good form three times a day, and he has an aunt who belongs to the Daughters of the American Revolution. A man with a past like that behind him couldn't neglect to acknowledge a simple little note.

There was Stephens, who is really a nice boy and who won the high average in Engineering and was given ninety-three in Rhetoric 1 by an instructor who came from Harvard; and Carlton who was elected to senior society and has had three years of uninterrupted training at sorority open houses; and Fulton whose uncle wrote a book and who is a prize athlete over whom seven organizations went crazy when he entered, and who finally joined the only first class fraternity in college—I'm sure the notes I wrote them were lost in the mails, or I should have heard from them.

Nancy says that I'm wrong in blaming the government, and that probably all these men got the letters that I wrote and failed to answer them through ignorance or carelessness just as some fellows keep their hats on when they talk to a woman, or fail to call after they've been invited to dinner, but that doesn't seem reasonable to me.

October

Who Pays?

I'VE just been up at their country place visiting the Simpkinses," George remarked to me this fall. "Cadillac, motor boat, house party, fine board, no laundry bill, nothing to pay; pretty soft."

I had met Simpkins at the end of August, and he had told me what a grind the summer had been to him. "I've had to work early and late," he said. "That family of mine had a tearing good time up north with their friends, but the bills were tremendously heavy, and you know somebody always has to pay."

The Beta Tau Sigma party, the papers said, had set a new standard for social events in this community. Nothing was lacking to make it a success—cabs, evening clothes (mostly rented), favors, theatre party, seven course luncheon—it cost a pretty sum. I wondered who was paying; father at home getting up early and going to bed late? Sister teaching, or clerking, or nursing? Mother going without the new gown or the vacation trip of which she was very much in need? These things more often than otherwise mean sacrifice; for some one has to pay.

Parker cut a pretty wide swath last year in college. He had the latest clothes; he never missed a good show—or a bad one; if anything was going on he could be found sitting in the front row, and there were unpleasant rumors about his associates. I knew his being in college was pinching at home a good deal, but his folks were quite willing to make the sacrifice in order that he might have the advantages that they had been denied. It wouldn't have been so bad if he had paid his part by boning on his college work. Mother could perhaps have afforded to deny herself a spring bonnet if son had needed the money to buy a Phi Beta Kappa pin; but as it was he finished the year in debt to every one and with a scholastic average of fifty nine. Those who were paying got little for their money.

For every good time you have, for every luxury you enjoy, for every dissipation in which you indulge or graft which you take advantage of, somebody is having to pay. You may charge the account at times, but ultimately the bills come in with interest.

It is better on the whole for each man to pay his share of the bill. No one respects a boy who is always eager to sit in, but who never reaches, or reaches far enough, for the check. He's a yellow sport and an unworthy son if he doesn't play the game fairly, economize occasionally, and square his half of the account by a return of manly character and good scholarship.

October

Happiness

UNTIL he was forty a neighbor of mine lived a happy, active, useful life. He had a good job at which he earned a salary sufficient to support his family comfortably. He was interested in community affairs, he was a useful citizen, he was enthusiastic over paying for the pretty house he had built, and his future seemed bright and satisfying.

Then, unfortunately, his aunt died and left him fifty thousand dollars. He gave up his job immediately, quit work, and set out to enjoy himself. The income from his legacy was scarcely as much as his salary had previously been, and as his leisure increased his desires multiplied quite disproportionately. He became discontented, nomadic, a lazy, useless citizen, who is happy nowhere. He spends his winters in Florida and his summers camping out in the woods or drift- ing up and down the river in a motor boat. He is bringing up his two boys to be unhappy loafers like himself. But he is a pathetic figure. He has not learned the lesson that there is no real happiness without work. The most unhappy discontented people I have ever known are those who have money enough to live on without following any regular daily occupation, and who put in their time looking for pleasure. The woman who has no occupation but bridge whist is a miserable creature, and the man who is trying to pay his obligations to the world by playing golf or billiards is an unhappy, discontented grouch. The most wretched men in the world are those who give up work before they are compelled to do so.