"The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord."—Proverbs xvi. 33.

III

THE WORSHIP OF LUCK

It is reported that Prince Bismarck once and again attributed some of the most remarkable successes he had won in diplomacy to the circumstance that he had used truth as one of his greatest resources. Well aware of the fact that truth, for its own sake, was not the first thing that was expected from him, the use of truth gave him the tactical advantage of knowing how almost inevitably the opposite diplomacy would interpret it. He told the truth in order that it might be acted upon as something else. To adopt his own characteristic phrase, he "used the truth." If half the truth, or an untruth, would have served his purpose better, either most likely would have been adopted and as readily used.

"You call that witty," said a great statesman once, when some one related to him the saying of a well-known politician to the same effect—"you call that witty—I call it devilish." It is a just description. If the report is reliable that Bismarck, even in grim jest, spoke of truth in this sense as one of his great resources, the confession ought to cover his name with infamy. I do not commit myself to the statement that he ever said this; but whether he did or not, he is credited with acting upon what is a very general impression of how truth may be used. With vast masses of people it has become perilously like a conviction that strict integrity, while good and desirable as an ideal, is yet too much of a risk for the purpose of what is popularly known as practical life. The advice said to have been given by a Yorkshireman to his son who was entering on a business career would, I imagine, be widely acclaimed as common-sense: "Get money; get it honestly, if you can—but get it."

We preachers tell young men that whether or not they get on in business, they cannot afford not to go up in character; and they are not in the world very long before they realize that its hopes in this admonition are but inverted fears, that the shake of its head is a scepticism which troubles not to articulate itself in words. A French cynic counsels us to always deal with a friend to-day on the possibility that he may be an enemy to-morrow. And there is a wide and deeply-rooted prejudice in favour of holding the imperatives of integrity on the same terms. Our very language in this direction betrays us. We talk about "smart" business men, "smart" professional men, and by the adjective we may mean men who, though "keen," are yet honourable in their methods; or we may mean men who are just as scrupulous as the law of the land or the arbitrary criterions of society oblige them to be. And young men feel the impress of this widely-shared sentiment in a way particularly vivid. They have, indeed, small chance to escape it. The world is profuse in its explanations of why men fail, but it has no mercy on the man who fails. It has its cheap jargon about inheritances and environment, and then kicks the man who is preached as their victim, into perdition. Our operations may not be nice, but young men soon find out, or they think they do, that it is success, not charity, which covers a multitude of sins. Hence the new commandment: "With all thy getting, get success"—

"Get place and wealth, if possible with grace,
If not, by any means get wealth and place."

The clamant need of our day is a clear teaching that shall appeal to us all, but especially to young men, as to what are the things that cannot be shaken, the things inseparable from a human life that is worth living. It is easy to part with our fine sense of integrity, but, once it is gone, it is the hardest thing in the world to recover. There are more senses than one in which we may speak of riches that are "beyond the dreams of avarice." The most valuable possession any man can have is the fight, either in his own conscience or to the world, to affirm himself to be an honest man. And the position I shall maintain in this address is, that there can be no sure success without honesty. Nor shall I speak about "absolute honesty" or the "strictest honesty," for I agree with those who say that there is but one degree of honesty. It is not a quality with grades and modulations. As well think, or try to think, of grades and modulations in the chastity of man and woman. Honesty, like chastity, is, or it is not.

We are often told that, from the lowest possible commercial standpoint, honesty is not only the best policy, it is the only policy. Whether or not it is the only policy depends upon the meaning we import into the term; of this I am sure—it is the best policy. But I shall not urge this doctrine upon you from the lower standpoint. That might do more than insult your intelligence; it would, I trust, offend against your moral self-respect. I assume that you all would hold it true with Archbishop Whately when he says, that though "honesty is the best policy, he is not an honest man who is honest for that reason." If, then, these latter remarks can carry the weight I want them to bear, what of those that have preceded them? How are we to explain a sentiment which is virtually a religion, having this one article for its creed: that honesty, while good as an ideal, cannot be invariably relied upon for practical concerns? How is it that so many men have to discover, when they are no longer young, that the thing which has passed from them and which they cannot recall is, after all, the one supreme value they possessed? There are many explanations of this tragedy, for tragedy it is, and not the least of them is, that so many young men have but one conception, one definition of success. These are men, and one is tempted to think at times that they are not so much a class as a people, who want material success and seek nothing else. They have no other standard by which to judge the thing behind the word. Not what we are, but what we have, if the latter is substantial and declarative, is the only idea which multitudes have of success. In a clever character-study of a well-known public man we are told that, "As far as he has a philosophy at all, it is this, that merit rides in a motor-car." It is a definition which fosters the impression that success can be secured the more quickly and surely by methods that are bound up with smartness, chance, or luck.

It is with the last of these I would come into somewhat close quarters. And let me admit, in the first place, that there is such a thing as luck, using the word in its common acceptation. In what is called a scientific treatment of the subject in hand I ought to say, as exactly as I can, what I myself understand by luck. It will leave abundance of room for criticism if I venture to define it—as some advantage that comes to a man independent of his moral worth, his native gifts, or of any equivalent he has rendered for it of industry and self-denial. That some people have such an advantage it would be useless to deny. Two youths, let us say, enter a business house about the same age, and at the same time. They are, as near as can be, equally matched in equipment to command success. In this respect there is little to choose between them. One begins entirely on his merits; he has no influence behind him to open doors before him as by some invisible hand. The other has influence; no matter what it is, or how it works, he has it, and it operates distinctly in his favour. A few years after, and the latter has far out distanced the former in position, salary, and outlook. And the reason is not the capacity of either; it is the arbitrary advantage, the piece of luck that one has had over the other from the start. "He has not much ability," I heard it remarked lately of a young fellow who, just having been licensed to preach, had also received a "call" to an influential church, and the remark elicited the significant answer: "No, but whether he has ability or not, his father has position and influence." This hints to us why certain men, if they do not fill, yet hold the positions they do. Take some men in high places, say in the political world. Recall a few names, if you can, of men who have held great positions in the State within the last quarter of a century, and does any sane person contend that in ability they stand out sheer above ten thousand good average men who crowd about them? I think it was Sydney Smith who said it was about equal to being canonized to marry into certain families. And a man would need to be a very emphasized fool quite to spoil the advantages of a long line of position, privilege, and family ascendency.

Take, again, a more typical case of what I mean by luck. It came under my own notice. A cloth-worker in Yorkshire, by carelessness or inadvertence, raises the nap of a given fabric a shade above the regulation height. He is dismissed, and the cloth is laid aside as spoiled. A French buyer comes in the place, and casting his eyes on it, instantly sees for it a future. That touch of heightened nap has done it. The manufacturer has his wits about him, and what a week before was a mistake is now a new and valuable design which, in a couple of years, makes him what some of us would regard as a substantial fortune. We are usually told that to admit the operation of this questionable factor in human affairs, called chance or luck, is inconsistent with a belief in the moral government of God, or, as we may prefer to call it, the reign of law. If this is so, how are we to read those old words that "chance happeneth to them all"? If we seriously contend that everything which happens in our human life is in accord with God's plans in us, and working through us, then I see not how we can refuse to hold such fore-ordination responsible for the grotesque, the irrational, the sinister, and the wicked in our actions. I could understand the objection were it limited to Nature, because that is a sphere in which it is the uses of things, and the uses precisely, which are the most obvious, and these compose, when taken together, a mighty reciprocal whole in which part answers to part, constituting an all-comprehensive and wondrous whole. There is no place in Nature for chance. Every particle of air is governed by laws of as great precision as the laws of the heavenly bodies. It keeps its appointed order, it serves its appointed ends. Nature never breaks out of its place. It has no such power—but human nature has. Man has enough free-will to make him responsible for what he does with it, and in the exercise of this mighty prerogative enters the element of chance or luck. We cannot establish free-will by rules of logic, we cannot gainsay it on the score of conviction. It helps us to interpret the great in human life and history, and what is sometimes even more to the purpose, it helps us to account for the little. As it has been well said: "It would save us much mental perplexity if we could assert without qualification that all is law, that everything happens as God ordains."

But God cannot make two mountains without a valley between; and He cannot give us free-will and withhold from us at the same time the freedom to make mistakes. The contradictions in human life do not yield to verbal simplicities, and, whether we like it or not, we have to acknowledge that this something called luck is a force in human events.

But let me say, in the second place, that there is nothing more easy than to exaggerate its extent and importance. Out of a hundred happenings that are generally attributed to luck, if we could find the genesis of each one and trace its evolution or unfolding, we should probably not find more than one that could be associated with the things that happen by chance. The case of a man who achieved what is called a "lucky fluke" out of a piece of spoiled cloth is perhaps the only instance of its kind on record in the history of cloth manufacture. I have admitted that there are cases where advantage falls to a man which cannot be explained by anything he deserves, or has done to win it. And the advantage, such as it is, often works untold hurt as an example. Just as the winnings of one gambler may tempt a hundred others to their undoing, so a single case of coveted luck is apt to encourage young men to transfer their hopes of success in many directions, from law to luck. You see here and there a man who accumulates a large fortune from beginnings that look as much like pure chance as was that piece of spoiled cloth. You see men close to you put into positions that have been secured, not by training or ability to fill them, but by the accident of influence, or, as you may think, by even more reprehensible methods; and your first impulse is to say that it is not merit but luck that holds the better cards. But let the impulse pass and bring quiet thought and good practical sense to this problem of success in men, and you will find that the instances are comparatively few where it is not about as wise to speak of it as luck as it would be so to characterize the law of cause and consequence. When you are discussing a man's success or his position, do not stop at the mere fact that he has it—that is obvious enough; try to know how he got it, and you may be surprised to find how little, after all, luck has had to do with it. In one of the most quoted of our Lord's parables we are told that "they that were ready went in to the marriage feast." And this right of entry was not a matter of luck. They went in because they were ready, and the others were left out because they had made no effort to be ready. And so if you would understand a man's success, know what he was doing while the opportunity tarried, while his chance seemed to wait, while his "psychological moment" appeared to linger.

Our fate or our fortune is not in great occasions; it is in our readiness to seize the opportunities that make great occasions. We frequently hear young men complain that they have not had a chance. Are they always sure of that? How often is it that their chance has been and gone, without their knowing it? "There are scores of young fellows in our place," said a large employer of labour lately, "who would be in vastly better positions than they are, had they worked as hard to be ready for the better positions as they are anxious to have them." There are multitudes of young men who appear to have lost sight of the distinction there may be between wishing for an opportunity and being ready to use the opportunity when it presents itself. As Sir Frederick Treves once said to the students at the Aberdeen University: "The man who is content to wait for a stroke of good fortune will probably wait until he has a stroke of paralysis." He who waits for good fortune without doing his part to make it possible, opens up the way for lazy habits and morbid conclusions about the arrangements of life. Luck in any serious business or profession is not so much the coming of opportunity as readiness to make the most of the opportunity when it comes. A man was speaking to me not long ago about one of the leading commercial men in this city. "What is there in him or about him to explain his success?" asked the man, and he answered his own question with the round assertion that "it was all luck." It happened that I had some reliable information about the man under discussion, and I want you to have it. Thirty years ago he was working from ten to twelve hours in the day as just an ordinary workman. At the close of each day's toil he had his programme of studies, which, in its range and character of the subjects attacked, would not have disgraced a good student at any university. Eventually his attention to business and his marked attainments won for him the recognition of his employers, which meant in after years a place which was ultimately a leading place, as one of them. Yet this was the man who was said to have won his success by a lucky turn of the wheel. I admit his advantages. I grant you that he showed himself to have brains and will above the average endowment of these great possessions. But let me ask you to mark this: he might have left his gifts unused, as so many of us do. It is probably not gifts, in eight cases out of every ten, that determine position, but our use of them. We have infinitely more in us than our will and determination ever bring out. How few of us know the rich things God has put in our nature; and we verily live and die in ignorance of rare deposits of wealth because we do not work the inward mines. This young man was wiser. He did not wait for his opportunity to turn up, he turned up the opportunity. Because he neither slumbered nor slept while it tarried, he was prepared to make the most of it when it presented itself. And I am persuaded that something like this is the true explanation of practically the whole of what thoughtless people set down to luck. What we call fore-ordination is verily the present which we have made out of the past. We first make habits, and then habits make us. In our to-day walks our to-morrow, and in a very solemn sense there is no "dead past." As it has been well said, "the tree that falls so disastrously is no accident; it had the fall determined a century ago in some injury it received as a sapling." [1]

There is much less luck in human affairs than is popularly supposed; and, if there were more than there is, it would, in the next place, be moral insanity to put our trust in it. "Nothing walks with aimless feet." Our life is no lottery. We may make foolish experiments with it, but we do so at our own risk. It is no plaything of chance, it is a stern responsibility which is determined by law that brooks no interference and excuses no indifference. The proverb tells us that "our lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing is of the Lord." And just as the dark forces that sweep through our life are not necessarily hostile forces but form part of the order of the world, so things that we regard as haphazard, merely cast into the lap of chance, may be divine agents working out a marvellous equality of opportunity throughout our human life. I affirm it without a shadow of qualification, that chance has no place whatever in the responsible formation of character, and the formation of character is the decision of destiny. Beware, then, lest in playing with this ignis fatuus of chance you are trifling with law, for law will not spare you.

You young men cannot make up your mind too soon that there can be no sure success apart from uprightness and integrity. You cannot too early in this life settle it as an immovable truth for you, that unswerving rectitude is not only a great and desirable ideal, it is the only practical course you can afford to follow. Goodness, I say again, is the only success, and I shall not try to save this statement by fencing the word "success" with any arbitrary definition of my own. I just mean by it what any man means by it who has a healthy moral perception of things. Success, like honesty, has but one degree, and as nothing is worthy to be called life which cannot be affirmed of God, so nothing can be called success which is not the resultant of right-doing. Every advantage which you would try to scheme or sneak or coerce in face of the protest of conscience, has in it its own curse and its certain defeat. Understand me: right-doing will not necessarily help you to make a fortune or achieve some great position. You may not have the special gifts to do either. Such gifts are something not ourselves which we might easily have been without. Neither religion nor morality promises to bestow these gifts, any more than religion or morality claims to regulate the colour of our hair or the inches of our stature. But when said, there is yet a wonderful power in right-doing. The man who does the right because he believes in it and loves it, whether it is called successful or not, is always bringing out far more than he thought was in him. The faithful doing of daily duty continually reveals opportunities which, used with readiness and a good conscience, act upon life with a perpetual and gracious benediction.

Then what about the end? It may seem a far-off cry to talk to you young men about that. But the end will come, and you will need nothing then which you do not need all the way. The end will only emphasize the need—the need of a good conscience. The day is coming when all tainted success will mock, as only a bad record can mock, when there is but time left to regret, and none to retrieve the past. "I am getting old," writes one, "and I am wealthy; but I would part with every shilling I possess, and take my risk for bread, to be at peace with my own conscience." Trample under your feet the immoral side of the maxim that nothing succeeds like success. Success is not always in hitting the things at which you aim; it is the good conscience that you are aiming only at right things. Let your success be goodness, and goodness will be your success. Leave luck to fools, and act as though it had no existence. Believe that character or manhood, without which nothing great is possible, is the content of your endowment put out to full advantage through grace and will. Believe that every man, worthy to be called a man, has in him the promise of the gradual supremacy of character over the accidents and happenings of circumstances. Be, then, your own luck. Link your life in Christ to God, and stand up to all the world and say—

"Perish policy and cunning,
Perish all that fears the light.
Whether losing, whether winning,
Trust in God and do the right."

[1] Rev. Thomas Templeton, M.A.