DRUDGERY

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 804, 26 October 1929, Page 8

DRUDGERY

THE QUIET CORKER

(Written for THE SUN by the Rev. Charles Chandler, Assistant City Missioner.) of the surest roads to success is by doing what we don’t want to do; by tackling the jobs that we have spent half our lives in avoiding. It’s by doing the things that ice don’t want to do that we develop character. “Bearding the lion in his den"—this consists in “having it out” in the presence of someone from whom we feel estranged—adds cubits to our spiritual statures. No boy or girl ever liked playing the five-finger exercise on the piano when a chum was whistling outside the front gate. We have, in the words of Ramsay MacDonald, “to be disciplined into drudgery." No man ever approached his prospective father-in-law without feeling that he would rather postpone the event. It has taken a whole lot of courage for some men of the more retiring disposition, to acquaint the maidens of their choice with the seriousness of their intentions. Abraham wasn’t pleased when he was asked to place his son on a bundle of faggots—it took some clinching of his teeth, and some setting of his jaw in order to obey that command to hie h afterward turned out to be but a trial of his faith. I doubt not but what Peter would have rather gone on fishing, and Matthew with the receiving of custom, if doing what they wanted to do, and avoiding the harder part, had been the sum total of their philosophy. It was not until Jesv.s said "Not My will, but Thine be done," that he had the resolution to see things through in the Garden of Gethsemane, and it's not until ice can think that thought, and repeat those words after Him, that we begin in earnest to mount the ladder of real success. It was by doing a whole lot of things that he didn’t want to do, that Abraham Lincoln worked his way up from thatched cottage to White House. Every notable achievement in both war and peace has been associated with much disciplining of unruly members, and he who slavishly obeys every prompting of his habit-forming baser self is (quite apart from what sages and saints may say of him), treading the “primrose” path to hell. If Man through the ages had always done what he wanted to do, we should still be “red in tooth and claw." Civilisation demands of men that they do not what they want to do as individuals, but rather what they ought to do as social beings. NEXT WEEK: THE JOYS OF INDIGENCE