True to His Home Part 16

"Wait for me a few minutes while I get ready," said Josiah Franklin. "I will have to shave."

The prospect of a lecture in the old South Church on the philosophical patriarch who dwelt in the land of Uz, and led his flocks, and saw the planets come and go in their eternal march, on the open plains or through the branches of pastoral palms, was a very agreeable one to little Ben.

He thought.

"Uncle Benjamin," he said, "a man who writes a book like Job leaves his thoughts behind him. He does not die like other men; his life goes on."

"Yes, that is what some people call an objective life. I call it a _projective_ life. A man who builds men, or things, for the use of men, lives in the things he builds. He has immortality in this world. A man who builds a house leaves his thought in the form of the house he builds. If he make a road, he lives in the road; if he invent a useful thing, he lives in the invention. A man may live in a s.h.i.+p that he has caused to be constructed, or his mind may see the form of a church, a hall, or a temple, and he may so build after what he sees that he makes his thoughts creative, and he lives on in the things that he creates after he dies. It was so with the builders of cities, of the Pyramids.

So Romulus--if there were such a man--lives in Rome, and Columbus in the lands that he discovered. The Pilgrim Fathers will always live in New England. Those who do things and make things leave behind them a life outside of themselves. I call such works a man's projected life."

Little Ben sat swinging the foot stove.

"He lives the longest in this world who invents the most useful things for others," continued Uncle Benjamin. "The thoughts of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton changed the world. Those men can never die."

Little Ben swung the stove in his hand.

Suddenly he looked up, and we fancy him to have said:

"Uncle Benjamin, have _I_ a chance?"

Jamie the Scotchman came into the house, jingling the door bell as he shut the door.

"Philosophizing?" said he.

"Little Ben here is inquiring in regard to his chance of doing something in the world--of living so as to leave his thoughts in creative forms behind. What do you think about it, Jamie?"

"Well, I don't know; it is a pretty hard case. Drumsticks will make a noise, so any man may make himself heard if he will. Certain it is Ben has no gifts; at least, I have never discerned any. There are no Attic bees buzzing around him, none that I have seen, unless there be such things up in the attic, which would not be likely in a new house like this."

Uncle Ben pitied the little boy, whose feelings he saw were hurt.

"Jamie, I have read much, and have made some observation, and life tells me that character, industry, and a determined purpose will do much for a man that has no special gifts. The Scriptures do not say that a man of gifts shall stand before kings, but that the man 'diligent in his business' shall do so. Ben here can rise with the best of the world, and if he has thoughts, he can project them. It is thinking that makes men work. He thinks.--Ben, you can do anything that any one else of your opportunities has ever done. There--I hate to see the boy discouraged."

"The fifteenth child among seventeen children would not seem likely to have a very broad outlook," said Jamie, "but it is good to encourage him; it is good to encourage anybody. He is one of the human family, like all the rest of us.--Are you going to the lecture? I will go along with you."

Josiah Franklin was now ready to go, and the party started. Josiah carried a lantern, and little Benjamin the foot stove with the coals.

As they walked along they met other people with lanterns and foot stoves.

Uncle Benjamin felt hurt at what Jamie had said, so he proceeded to encourage the boy as they went along.

"If you could invent a stove that would warm the whole church, you would have a _projected_ life, for example," said he.

"Have I a chance?" asked again the future inventor of the Franklin stove.

"Or if you could print something original that might live; or found a society to study science--something might come out of that; or could make some scheme for a better government of the people in these parts; but that would be too great for you. There I go!"

Uncle Benjamin stumbled. Little Ben helped him up.

They came to the South Church, where many lanterns, foot stoves, and tallow dips were gathered, and shadowy forms were moving to and fro.

Little Ben set down the stove in the pew. The lecture began. He heard the minister read the sublime pa.s.sage of the ancient poem beginning, "Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said." He heard about the "morning stars singing together," the "sweet influences of Pleiades," and the question, "Canst thou bind the sea?"

The boy asked, "Have I a chance? have I a chance?" The discouraging words of Jamie the Scotchman hung over his mind like a cloud.

The influence of the coals led Josiah Franklin to slumberland after his hard day's work. Little Ben saw his father nod and nod. But Uncle Benjamin was in the Orient with the minister, having a hard experience for the good of life with the patriarch Job.

"Have I a chance?" The boy shed tears. If he had not gifts, he knew that he had personality, but there was something stirring within him that led his thoughts to seek the good of others.

The nine-o'clock bell rang. The lecture was over.

"Good--wasn't it?" said Jamie the Scotchman as they went out of the church and looked down to the harbor glimmering under the moon and stars, and added:

"Ben, you will be sure to have one thing to spur you on to lead that 'projected life' your Uncle Benjamin tells about."

"What is that, sir?"

"A hard time, like Job--a mighty hard time."

"The true way to knowledge," said Uncle Benjamin encouragingly.

Uncle Benjamin felt a hand in his great mitten. It was little Ben's. The confidence touched his heart.

"Ben, you are as likely to have a projected life as anybody. A man rises by overcoming his defects. Strength comes in that way."

Little Ben went through the jingling door with a heart now heavy, now light. He set down the lantern, and climbed up to his bed under the roof.

He was soon in bed, the question, "Have I a chance?" still haunting him.

In summer there would be the sound of the wings of the swallows or purple swifts in the chimney at night as they became displaced from their nests. He would start up to listen to the whirring wings, then sink into slumber, to awake a blithe, light-hearted boy again.

All was silent now. He could not sleep. His fancy was too wide awake.

Was Uncle Benjamin right, or Jamie the Scotchman? Had he a chance?

CHAPTER XVI.

"A BOOK THAT INFLUENCED THE CHARACTER OF A MAN WHO LED HIS AGE."

"YOU must read good books," said Benjamin Franklin's G.o.dfather. "How sorry I am that I had to sell my pamphlets!"

Books have stamped their character on young men at the susceptible age and the turning points of life. But their influence for good or evil comes to receptive characters. "He is a genius," says Emerson, "who gives me back my own thoughts." The gospel says, "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear."

Abraham Lincoln would walk twenty miles to borrow a law book, and would sit down on a log by the wayside to study it on his return from such a journey. Horace Greeley says that when he was a boy he would go reading to a woodpile. "I would take a pine knot," he said, "put it on the back log, pile my books around me, and lie down and read all through the long winter evenings." He read the kind of books for which his soul hungered.

He read to find in books what he himself wished to be. A true artist sees and hears only what he wishes to see and hear. An active, earnest, resolute soul reads only that which helps him fulfill the haunting purpose of his life. Almost every great man's books that were his companions in early years were pictures of what he most wished to be and to do.

How many men have had their spiritual life quickened by a hymn! How many by a single poem! Homer and Ossian filled the imagination of Napoleon.