Quotable

Entering on Life by Cunningham Geikie is the first of his books we have chosen to publish. The book is for young men, but I doubt there are any today who would even dare to read such a book. He assumes a real education where the young man knows Latin and Greek and has a firm grasp of English! Do such young men even exist today?

Nevertheless, it behooves the older folks to read such a book and try to share the message with the vain youngster of our day! Here is a passage quoted in his coverage of youthful pleasures, sports, giddiness, etc. The whole section is things society needs to hear today, even more than ever!

But we are not to abuse our blessings, or surfeit ourselves with a gluttony of either one kind or another. Pleasure worth the name must be innocent, and must come only as a relaxation from work. To give oneself up to it is to miss it in any true sense. Even Cicero, though only a moralist, declares that he is not worthy to be called a man who is willing to spend even a single day wholly in pleasure. Mere lightness is only a foil to something graver, where the taste is healthy. It is the vox-humana stop in the solemn roll of the Psalm of Life. To do nothing but laugh, or to laugh mainly, is to write one’s own condemnation. It is a shallow stream that dimples all the way. Nothing hurts worse than frivolity; nothing unfits for business more, or forms worse habits for success, or wastes the time in which we might mold the future, and nothing leaves less return. Only to “giggle and make giggle” as Cowper says of the clerks in the office he attended, is hardly a fit use of life. There is something better than laughing, after all. The story told by Roger Ascham of Lady Jane Grey opens a new world to mere triflers, and there are others as pleasant within our reach. Her father and the duchess having passed by, hunting in the park, her tutor asked her if she would not like to join in the sport? “All the sport in the park,” said she, “is but a shadow of that pleasure I find in this book”—a volume of Plato she had in her hand. The mind and the heart are nobler parts of us than our mere animal spirits, and have enjoyments of their own. Not to seek pleasure from such higher sources, but to give ourselves up to inferior, is to barter our birthright for Esau’s pottage. If you be wise you will vary your pleasures, and add to them by mixing the grave with the gay. Mere amusement soon cloys, and leaves even Xerxes to offer a royal gift to anyone who could invent some new spur to his satiety. Nothing grows duller than mere amusement, and no one needs it so much as he who has most of it. But to be a mere fribble is not the chief end of man.