THE HABIT OF DOING MORE THAN PAID FOR 603interest than it is theirs to find his weak point. Blame is safer
than praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as
all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of
success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken
of me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.Study this, the philosophy of the immortal Emerson, for it may
serve as a modifying force that will temper your metal and prepare
you for the battles of life, as carbon tempers the steel. If you are very
young, you need to study it all the more, for it often requires the stern
realities of many years of experience to prepare one to assimilate and
apply this philosophy.
It is better that you should understand these great truths as a
result of my undiplomatic presentation of them than to be forced to
gather them from the less sympathetic sources of cold experience-a
teacher that knows no favorites. But when I permit you to profit by
the truths I have gathered from the teachings of this unsympathetic
teacher called experience, I am doing my best to show you favoritism,
which reminds me somewhat of the times that my father used to
"do his duty" by me, in the woodshed, always starting with this bit of
encouraging philosophy: "Son, this hurts me worse than it does you:'
There's a story that should leave in your mind the importance of this
lesson. The story had its setting in the city of Antioch, in ancient
Rome, two thousand years ago, when the great city of Jerusalem and
all the land of Judea were under the oppressive heel of Rome.
The star figure of the story was a young Jewish man by the name
of Ben Hur, who was falsely accused of crime and sentenced to hard
labor at the galley's oar. Chained to a bench in the galley, and being
forced to tug wearily at the oars, Ben Hur developed a powerful body.
Little did his tormentors know that out of his punishment would
grow the strength with which he would one day gain his freedom.
Perhaps Ben Hur himself had no such hopes.