| The Ministry of Comfort |
Chapter 18 |
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A genial writer has given us a new beatitude – “Blessed be drudgery!” and in a delightful essay proves that we owe to what we speak of ordinarily as drudgery the best things in our life and character. A child dislikes to be called in the morning and to have to be off to school at the same hour every day, and chafes at rules, bells, lessons, and tasks; but it is in this very drudgery of home and school that the child is being trained for noble and beautiful life. The child that misses such discipline, growing up as its own sweet will inclines, may seem to be fortunate and may be envied, but it is missing that without which all its future career will be less beautiful and less strong. “Blessed be drudgery!” It is in the tiresome routine of hours, tasks, and rules that we learn to live worthily and that we get into our life itself those qualities which belong to true manhood. Those who have been brought up from childhood to be prompt, systematic, to pay any debt on the day, always to keep ever promise and appointment, never to be late, will carry the same good habits into their mature life, in whatever occupation or calling it may be spent, and when these qualities will mean so much in success.
Thus, irksome things play an important part in the making of life. We can shirk them if we will, but if we do so we throw away our opportunity, for there is no other way to success. Young people should settle it once for all that they will shrink from no task, no toil, no self discipline that faces them, knowing that beyond the thing which is unpleasant and hard lies some treasure that can be reached and possessed in no way but by accepting the drudgery. Nor can we get some other one to do our drudgery for us, for then the other person, not we, would get the reward which belongs to the task work and which cannot be got apart from it. We must do our own digging. The rich man’s son might easily find some other one who would be willing to study for him for a money consideration, but no money could buy the gains of study and put them in among his own life treasures. We can acquire knowledge, culture, breadth of mind, only through our own work.
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