3. Work, then, is the significance of our manhood. We are those who present themselves to the earth in the eye of God as workers. We create a world of our own — the world of human society. We build a city, we organize a fellowship, we produce a wealth, which were not there until we called them into existence out of the resources and materials supplied us by God in nature. And every one contributes to this work, every one is a worker, who spends a continuous and rational efi'ort in creating, or sus- taining, or fulfilling, or enriching, the. social fabric that man has fashioned for himself. All who contribute by head, or hand, or heart, to the common endeavour have found and verified their manhood ; they have justified themselves as members of that humanity which for ever goes forth to its work and to its labour. And, reversely, those who play no such part at all, who have no intelligible function to fulfil, who bring no contribution, who have discovered no rational purpose for which to labour, and no special use for their heads or their hands, and no end that they can serve, and can see no reason why they should not be idle if they choose, and leisured when they like, and live to please themselves — such, the worklesB, have failed their manhood ; they have betrayed humanity.
'S. Smiles, Character, 98.
324 THE DAY'S WORK
^ On a passenger ship the officers and crew keep the watches day and night, and busy themselves continually with the working and the safety of the vessel ; while the passengers, looking upon the voyage as a mere holiday, amuse themselves on deck by day, and lie down in their berths at night, without any sense of responsibility. But on board ship every one knows that the positions and relations of passengers and crew are of a special and temporary kind, due to the specialization of social function through the division of labour, and that they justify themselves by that very fact. When Jack gets ashore, it is his turn for a holiday ; while yonder lounging passenger in the deck-chair will have to put on his harness again as soon as the vessel reaches port, and work all the harder because of the respite he is now enjoying. What is natural and proper, for the time being, on board of an ocean liner is neither natural nor tolerable on the voyage of life. Here all are sharers in a common duty and responsibility. No one has any prescriptive right to enter him- self in the ship's books as a mere cabin-passenger. In some capacity or other every one is morally bound to take a part in the working of the vessel; and, from the point of view of social obligation, those who refuse to do so are no better than maling- erers or mutineers.^
^ Indolence is one name of many for the abstraction of Francis's mind and the inactivities of his body. He was not of the stuff to " break ice in his basin by candle-light," and no doves Ikittered against his lodging window to wake him in summer, but he was not indolent in the struggle against indolence. Not a lifetime of mornings spent in bed killed the desire to be up and doing. In the trembling hand of his last months he wrote out in big capitals on pages torn from exercise-books such texts as were calculated to frighten him into his clothes. " Thou wilt not lie a-bed when the last trump blows " ; " Thy sleep with the worms will be long enough," and so on. They were ineffectual. His was a long series of broken trysts — trysts with the sunrise, t rysts with Sunday Mass, obligatory but impossible ; trysts with friends. Whether it was indolence or, as he explained it, an unsurmountable series of detaining accidents, it is certain that he, captain of his soul, was not captain of his hours. They played him false at every stroke of the clock, mutinied with such cunning that he would keep an appointment in all good faith six hours after it was past. Dismayed, he would emerge from his room upon a household preparing for dinner, when he had lain listening to sounds he thought betokened breakfast. He was
* J. C. Lambert.
PSALM CIV. 23 325
always behindhand with punctual eve, and in trouble with strict noon.^
II.
Work as a High Calling of God.
1. We ought to think of our work as an expression of our personal life — to think of it as the means granted to us to give body and coherence and aim to the great universe-forces. And then, if in our imagination we can identify these universe-forces with the wisdom and love of God, the One who with us lives and works, we shall be able to rise to the point of view which Christ took — that point of view which becomes both light and inspira- tion : " My Father worketh continuously, and so do I." That is the highest reach of the human spirit — to conceive of one's work as a part of the Divine activity itself. The daily life, with its tasks and occupations, its duties and its cares, its problems to solve, its burdens to carry, its beauty to appreciate and enjoy — all these become an echo and reflection of what the infinite activity itself is. Viewed in this light