| Strength and Beauty |
Chapter 15 |
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Some students try to get through school or college easily. They may succeed in a way, too, by using keys and interlinears, and by practicing deceptions of various kinds. They may pass their examinations after a fashion, and get through, being graduated at length with their class. They may boast of their shrewdness in eluding the keen discernment of their teachers, but the harm of it all is done to themselves. They are the losers, not the teachers. It is themselves they have cheated. They think they have got something for nothing. No, they have got nothing for nothing. Their diploma is only a lie – there is nothing in them to correspond with its flattering statements. And nothing worse can happen to any one than to be taken by others for what he is not. Sooner or later the truth must be known, and when it is discovered that a man’s certificates are false, that there is nothing in him to justify them, the revelation is very humiliating.
We need along the years of our life every item and detail of preparation that is brought within our reach in our school and training days. He who fails to use his opportunities, to make ready in every possible way for the calling he is to pursue, is preparing mortification and failure for himself in the days when in the stress of life’s duty he shall find himself wanting. “A lesson missed in boyhood is a chance for disaster in future years.” A whole curriculum missed is preparation for a career of inefficiency and dishonor. It is fatal folly to chuckle over getting through college without hard study. The man who does the chuckling is to be pitied, not congratulated. A true education can be got only by paying the full price. That which is worth having we can get only by hard, patient, persistent study.
Or take knowledge, culture. Every true hearted man desires to be intelligent. But there is only one way to win this attainment – you must pay the full price. Indolence never yet won it. You cannot pick it up as one may find a diamond lying on the street and appropriate it for his enriching. The gold must be dug out of the depths of the rock, dug out grain by grain, dug out, too, by your own hands. It is wealth one cannot get by inheritance, as men get farms and money and stocks for which they have never toiled. It is a treasure which no one can give unto us, however willing he might be to do it. We must gather it for ourselves, must pick the precious metal out of the hard rocks with our own pick.
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