SARY
OF THE

ERSITY

A

TURNING-POINTS IN LIFE.

CHAPTER I.

Introductory Thoughts.

ANY one who has arrived at that era of his own history in which Memory more than Hope governs the horizon of human life-who analyzes the motives and muses on the events of his own life-story, and who learns to watch with intense human interest that drama of life which day by day is unfolding in all the relationships that surround him-will, I think, understand the title of this work, and the line of thought indicated by the phrase. There are, unquestionably, "turning-points" both in the history of the race and in the history of the individual. Such are the great battles, the great revolutions, the great discoveries of history. Each art, each science, has its "turning-points"-its moments. Such are evermore to be found in the lives of individuals. These turning-points are not mere accidents. They have generally a moral significance, and are fraught with special lessons.

In what men regard as mere chance-work there is often order and design. What we call a "turning-point" is simply an occasion which sums up and brings to a result previous training. Accidental circumstances are nothing except to men who have been trained to take advantage of them. For instance, Erskine made himself famous when the chance came to him of making a great forensic display, but unless he had trained himself for the chance, the chance would only have made him

ridiculous.

A great occasion is worth to a man exactly what his antecedents have enabled him to make of it.

Next, the realm of the fortuitous is also the domain of Providence. The subject is difficult enough, but some principles seem perfectly clear: that the universe is not bereft of the fatherhood of God; that as the child is trained and directed aright by its father, so, with the education of the individual, the education of the world is progressively carried on. The world is given to man that he may conquer and subdue it; the world is the appointed theatre for the exercise of his intelligence and his energies. We may expect that the providence of God will interpose at critical conjunctures to favor the ends which he designed. That general training which is afforded to the faculties with which we are endowed seems subordinated through the events of life to a law within the law, to a life beyond the life.

Every life as it unrolls has its turning-points-its critical moments. Among these turning-points there is often one that constitutes the crisis of being. School, college, business, friendship, love, accidents, deaths, may all prove such to us. None the less are our schemes, our chances, or our mistakes and disappointments. There comes also a great spiritual crisis to which ordinary life is related, either as the preparation or the result. In looking at the governing facts of individual human history there are certain distinctions which require to be carefully drawn. We may see that in the moral world there are laws as certain as the laws of the material world. We see that courage, energy, enterprise, good faith, kindness, are truly fertile with results and with rewards. These indicate the ordinary modes by which our turning-points in life are affected. Beyond this there is the vague, vast chapter of incident, that seems capricious, but is probably an ordered plan. Taking a larger field of vision, we see that this present life can not be

understood without reference to supernatural facts and another life. Those who have achieved the most for our race, or have struggled to attain the loftiest ideal of character for themselves, have often fallen in the conflict. Their story is taken up and finished in the life beyond. The banner of humanity, soiled and torn here, will be planted in triumph on a happier shore.

Let me endeavor, at greater length, to work out this line of discussion.

A man must have some self-knowledge, some self-insight, before he can dispassionately review his own history. A man can not see his blunders while he is playing his game; but when the game is very nearly over he can see little else except his blunders. And yet he may have played a very fair game after all. And it is a truth in military science that no battle is fought without blunders, and the goodness of generalship practically consists in the comparative fewness of blunders. It is very touching to see such renowned statesmen as Earl Russell and the late Sir James Graham-men who zealously contended during their political career for the absolute indefeasibility of their conduct—as the shadows darken, confess candidly the number and greatness of their blunders. And if calm, meditative introspection is rare, it is something still more difficult to understand others, to do justice to them, to "put yourself in his place," to forget rivalries and feuds in sympathy and appreciation. Really to do so is a mixed moral and intellectual achievement of a somewhat high order. There are certain stages of growth before a man can do this. First of all, man has the sense of novelty, the desire, ever unsatisfied, to see, or hear, or do something fresh. Then intelligent admiration succeeds the mere sense of wonder. Men desire to have a knowledge of the laws that pervade the world of matter and the world of mind around them.

Then comes, higher still, I think, in the scale, the faculty that interests man in the human interests that surround him. On the intellectual side this faculty enables him to grasp by mental acts the shifting panorama of history and the poetry and passion of life, and on the moral side it gives him sympathy and gumption, and the desire to act justly, charitably, and purely with the practical wish to do all the good he can in all the ways he can to all the people he can.

Besides this conscious feeling of having blundered, and the wholesome humility such a feeling should inspire, there will ensue on any such retrospect the feeling that there have been great "turning-points in life." Some of these blunders will certainly be connected with some of these turning-points, and some of these turning-points will connect themselves with the very reverse of blunders, that is, with what has been best and worthiest in our imperfect lives. But many of them will be odd, strange, inexplicable. After eliminating all that can be explained as the legitimate results of certain practical lines of conduct, it is still remarkable how large a realm in human life is occupied by what is simply and absolutely fortuitous. And this presence of chance can not really be a matter of chance. So far from that, it is, I believe, part of the constitution of things under which we live. Just as we live in an order of nature, where the seasons succeed each other, not in mere arithmetical order, but in all sweet variety, so events do not succeed each other according to a clearly defined system of causation, but with a liability to the constant recurrence of what is accidental and fortuitous. Probably all the phenomena of human life, as of nature, are referable to law; but still it would be wearisome work to us, constituted as we are, to watch all the unvaried sequences of order. Instead of that we only dimly see the vague skirts, the vast shadowy forms of such laws, and most things below the skies remain as uncer

tain, uncertified, transitory as the skies themselves. And this weird, fortuitous realm is doubtless ordered for the best, and is no mystery to the great Lawgiver, although his laws are inexplicable to us, and are to us as confused as the rush and roar of complicated machinery when first from the sweet South we enter the grim establishments of those masterful Northern manufacturers.

As I have been speaking of the fortuitous, let us mark off clearly a set of cases peculiarly likely to be confounded with it. A man finds a watch upon the ground. This was Paley's famous illustration, which has a regular pedigree in the history of literature. To employ this used-up teleological watch once more, it is by no means a fortuitous event, whether the man seeks to restore the watch to its owner or forthwith appropriates the same. To one man the watch will be an overmastering temptation, and he will pocket it; to another the watch will be destitute of the least power of exciting temptation, and he would immediately deposit it with the town crier. The result, in either case, is simply the result of a man's disposition, character, and antecedent history. The same sort of thing happens under much more difficult and complicated circumstances. A man makes a certain decision, and in after-life he is spoken of as having made such a very wise or unwise decision; or it is said that in a certain emergency he acted with such vigor, or promptness, or justness, or the reNow what I wish to deny altogether is the apparently fortuitous character of such transactions. The whole previous life, so to speak, had been a preparation for that particular minute of momentous action. It was a sum, duly cast up, giving the result in particular figures. The practical force of these considerations is evident. A man is dismissed his ship for drunkenness. It seems a sharp penalty. Yes, but the intoxication was not a fortuitous event. There must have

verse.