The Young Man Leaving
Home
by John Angell James, 1844
DANGERS OF A MINOR KIND
Besides the formidable and appalling perils which have
been already enumerated, as awaiting the young man on his leaving the house
of his father, and entering on the business of life, there are others,
which, if they do not expose him to the same moral jeopardy, are of
sufficient consequence to his well-being to deserve attention. Character may
be injured by many things which can scarcely be called immoralities. And
misery, yes vice also, may grow out of indiscretions and
imprudences.
I. Absence from home may beget forgetfulness of home, and
indifference to it —and such a state of mind,
where there is much at home worthy to be remembered and loved, is not only
unamiable in itself—but injurious to its possessor. Home is not only the
scene of enjoyment to the youthful mind—but it is the soil in which the
seeds of the social charities and virtues are first sown and grow; so that
the child who, with much reason for loving his father's house, is destitute
of this affection while there, or loses it when he leaves the spot long
trodden by his infant and boyish feet, is a most unpromising character.
The young man, who, upon leaving the house that has
sheltered him from his birth, cuts the ties which ought to bind him to that
dear spot, and casts no longing, lingering look behind; who allows all its
lovely images to sink into oblivion amid new and ever-shifting scenes; who
can forget father and mother, brothers and sisters, in his society with
strangers; and whose heart is never under the influence of an attraction to
the circle of all that is related to him on earth, is destitute, at any
rate, of social virtue, and is in peril of losing all other principles of
morality.
Cherish, then, young man—cherish a fond affection for
your parents' house; it may be humble—but it is home to you. You may be
rising higher and higher at every step above the lowly spot on which your
cradle was rocked, and may be outstripping in prosperity those with whom you
inhabited it—but still let it ever be sacred to you. Let not your parents
have to say to each other with tears, when they have waited years for a
visit, and months even for a letter, "Our son has forgotten us!" Let them
not have to exclaim, in bitterness of spirit, "How sharper than a serpent's
tooth it is—to have a thankless child!"
Keep up a constant correspondence with home by letters—an
additional motive to which you now possess in cheap postage—and let every
line be such as shall be music to a father's and a mother's heart. As often
as your engagements will allow, gladden them with a visit. Convince them
that neither time, distance, nor prosperity, can lead you to forget them.
How will it delight them to see that neither new scenes, nor new
occupations, nor new relations, can ever alienate your heart from them!
The preservation of a tender love for home and its
occupants, has proved in some cases the last tie to virtue, and a last
preservation from ruin. When all other kinds of excellence were lost, and
every other motive had ceased to influence, this one lingering feeling was
left—and filial affection prevented the complete abandonment of the
character to the desolation of vice. "What will my poor father and my dear
mother say and feel—and, my brothers and my sisters too, who yet love me?
and how shall I ever be able to face them again?" By this one question the
youth, about to swing off into the turbid stream of vice that was rolling
by, held on, until time was given for other and more powerful influences to
come, and the love of home saved its possessor from the perdition that
seemed to await him.
II. In opposition to this
danger, the love of home has
been so strong, so fond, so delicate in some—that they have been really
injured by it, through all their future life.
It has promoted, and even produced, such a softness and
feebleness of character, as totally unfitted them to struggle with the
difficulties of the world, and rendered them good for nothing—but to be
nursed in the lap of luxurious ease. Parents have sometimes lent a helping
hand to this mischief, and have cherished in their children a whimpering
fretfulness after home, and such a feeling of dependence on its comforts, as
has rendered them, through their whole existence, pitiable spectacles of
fretful delicacy and helpless imbecility. After what I have said, no one
will suspect me of encouraging an indifference to home, when I call upon my
youthful readers to be willing to leave it, for the sake of their future
welfare. Act the part of a good child, in loving your father's home and its
happy circle; and act also the part of a man, in being willing to leave it,
for the sake of learning to perform your part well in the affairs of life.
Do not cherish such a hankering after home as will make every situation
uncomfortable, and inflict wretchedness upon you wherever you are. Let not
your parents be made unhappy by letters full of complaint, and tales of
lamentation and woe. Rove not from place to place in quest of that which you
will never find—a situation abroad that will command all the indulgences of
a father's abode. Acquire a manliness of character, a nobleness and firmness
of mind, that can endure hardships and make sacrifices.
It is desirable, of course, that your parents should
procure a situation for you, or that you should procure one for yourself,
where as much comfort may be secured as is usually attainable—for we have no
need to court annoyance, discomfort, and privation. But do not be
over-fastidious about these matters, nor let your happiness depend upon
having your palate, your convenience, and your ease—consulted and gratified
even in the minutest particulars.
Do not set out in life the slave of little things. No
situation is without some inconveniences. Human life is a journey; all men
are travelers; and travelers do not expect the comforts of their own home,
when upon the road. Cultivate a hardihood of mind, that shall make you
insensible to petty annoyances. Look at great things, aim at great things,
and expect great things—then little ones will neither engage, nor amuse, nor
distress you.
III. Among the minor
perils to which you are exposed on leaving home, is
the liability of acquiring an unsettled, roving, and visionary disposition.
Now and then a boy of erratic mind and precocious instability is found, who
is ever shaping new and strange courses for himself, and laying schemes for
adventure and enterprise. These, however, are comparatively rare cases. But
the spirit of roaming is not infrequently awakened when a youth leaves home;
then "all the world is before him," as he imagines. But, without making
Providence his guide, he begins to think of looking further for himself than
his judicious friends have done for him. A useful and honorable employment
is selected; good situations are procured for acquiring a knowledge of his
business, perhaps at much cost and trouble. His friends rejoice in the idea
of his comfortable and advantageous disposal. But before long, comes a
letter of complaint, which banishes from his father's mind all these ideas
of his son's happy position, and fills him with perplexity. Much against the
hopes and wishes that his friends had formed, a change takes place, and the
youth removes to another situation. Here he stays not—but removes somewhere
else. At length he wishes to go abroad, and try his fortune at sea. This is
done, and he embarks. One voyage is enough, and he returns home, weary of
foreign travel and of the waves, and is now a dead weight upon his father's
hands. He is not immoral. He commits no vice. He does not grieve his friends
by profligacy. He is not indolent—but his versatile, unsettled, visionary
disposition, makes them sick at heart, and convinces them that he will never
be a comfort to them, or do anything good for himself. And he never does.
Life is worn out by him in trying many things—and succeeding in nothing!
IV. It may not be
unnecessary to caution you against
a spirit of insubordination and disrespect towards your employers.
It not infrequently happens, that a young man has his comfort destroyed, and
his character injured—by constant collision with his employer. Sometimes the
fault is all on one side; the youth has been so petted and spoiled at home,
has had his own way so entirely, and been left so much to be his own
employer—that the yoke of authority, however light and easy—is felt to be
galling and intolerable, and, like an untamed bullock, he resents and
resists it—to the annoyance of his employer, and his own injury. Young man,
if this has been your case, instantly change, or you are undone. Such a
disposition will not only be your misery—but your ruin. No one can be
prepared to become a employer—but by first acting as a servant; and the way
to govern is first to obey. Give up your spoiled habits and caprices—and the
sooner the better. Call into exercise your judgment and good sense. Give
over the contest with your employer—he must be obeyed, and it is as much for
your interest as for his, that he should.
But suppose that he is an austere man, a hard master, an
unreasonable employer—even in that case carry your patience and submission
to the utmost limit of endurance. If there be absolute tyranny and cruelty,
or an intolerable severity—make it known to your parents, after having
mildly expostulated against it without effect. Do not by impertinence, by
obstinacy, or by rebellion, make bad worse. The galled animal which is urged
on by a furious driver, and which cannot escape from the reins and collar,
avoids much pain by quiet and patient submission—resistance only brings more
blows from his unrelenting employer, and causes deeper wounds by the
fretting and friction of the harness.
Perhaps in most cases of disagreement, there is a little
fault on both sides. I know an excellent young man who was
apprenticed to a employer in a respectable trade, and of a tolerably good
disposition, and who made a profession of true religion. But this employer
was a very bad tradesman, and had a wife who was mirthful, worldly, and
exceedingly imperious in ordering the young men who were in the house. The
youth I speak of saw the fault of his employer, and felt the haughty
demeanor of the wife. Instead of submitting with a good grace to many things
that were certainly very annoying, he was constantly in strife about little
things, that kept him in perpetual wretchedness. Sometimes his aim was
really to correct the blunders into which the employer fell, and to avert
the consequences of them; but he often did so pertly and disrespectfully,
and therefore met with anger and rebuke in return. He complained to his
friends, and made them wretched without relieving himself; and had he not
been released from his situation, he might possibly have absconded, and been
ruined. I have since heard him say that, much as his employer was to blame,
and much cause as he had to complain, yet if he had himself possessed a
little more patience and prudence, and less irritability and
combativeness—he would have saved himself incalculable wretchedness, and
averted much ill-will and opposition. Let this be a warning to you. In a
former part of this volume, I have alluded to the discomfort of such a case,
as one of the sources of moral danger. I have now dwelt upon it more at
length to show that it is sometimes brought on by a spirit of
insubordination, and that it may be in great measure avoided by an obedient,
conciliatory, and submissive temper.
V. Entanglements in love, and the rash formation of
attachments and engagements of this kind ,
are another snare into which young men away from home are too apt to fall.
Besides the love of society, and the desire of companionship, there is a
susceptibility—a strange and restless emotion, seated deep in the heart of
youth—which pants for an alliance of the soul with some dear selected
object—closer than is felt or found in the warmest general friendship. The
attraction of the sexes towards each other is one of the instincts planted
in our nature by the hand of Him who formed it, and was intended, like every
other arrangement of Providence, for benevolent purposes. And when this
passion is guided by prudence and sanctified by piety, it becomes a source
of felicity, which if it does not remove, at least mitigates the woes of our
fallen state. "It must, however, be a reasonable, and not a reckless
passion. A check must be given to these emotions, while immature years are
passed in the acquisition of knowledge, or in preparation for some useful
station in society. The young affections should be restrained until the
period arrives, when it will be honorable and safe to unfetter them. For
lack of such restraint, many a youth has dashed his earthly hopes, and
dragged out a miserable existence."
Marriages formed in youth have often led to dishonorable
dissolution of them—or a wretched marriage. The heart grows faster than the
judgment, and should not be allowed in this matter to be our first and only
guide. A youth not out of his apprenticeship is a poor judge of the fitness
of a person as young as himself to be his companion for life; and his mind
should be occupied by other things. "It is not to be denied that, when
circumstances justify it, a reciprocal affection between the sexes, founded
on virtuous and honorable principles, is one of the purest sources of
earthly happiness. It seems as if the Creator, in pronouncing upon the
sinning pair the curses which their disobedience so justly merited, left
them—in pity for their calamities—this soothing, mitigating blessing."
But early connections, especially if clandestine ones,
formed and cherished without the consent or knowledge of parents—have rarely
proved happy ones. In some cases the dissolution of them at the imperative
command of parental authority, has been followed by an injurious influence
over the young man's future destiny, inasmuch as it has made him either
reckless or cynical. I have some painful instances of this before my mind's
eye at this moment, some of which are of melancholy, almost tragic interest.
VI. Where a youth has been much indulged at home, and not
trained to habits of persevering application and patient industry—he is in
danger of sinking into INDOLENCE, and then into vice.
This tendency is not always the result of parental
neglect—but is occasionally found in youths, who have had the best precepts
to guide them, and the most stimulating examples to quicken them. To
whatever cause it may be attributed, indolence is an evil of immense
magnitude. There may be no actual vice, nothing at present bordering on
immorality—but only a disgraceful and shameless inactivity. Nothing rouses
the inert and indolent youth. His employer frowns, scolds, threatens, or
coaxes, stimulates, and promises—but it is all in vain. Nothing moves him.
It is a difficulty to rouse him from his slumber, or draw him from his bed.
And when he is up, he may almost as well be in his chamber, for of the
little he does—and it is as little as he can make it—he does nothing
willingly, and nothing well. It is more trouble to get him to do anything,
than it is to do it oneself.
If one single abstract word may express his character, it
is "laziness." What a pitiable and almost hopeless spectacle! A young man
gifted by Providence, perhaps with a mind susceptible of improvement, and
talents for business, which if cultivated would lead to eminence—dozing away
the most precious period of existence, wasting his time, burying his talent
and sleeping upon its grave, disappointing the hopes of his parents,
tormenting by his incorrigible laziness the heart of his employer, and
preparing himself, probably for vice—certainly for misery.
"Indolence throws open the avenues of the soul to
temptations, and the great evil spirit, in his malignant march through the
earth, seizes upon the occasion, and draws the unwary youth into his toils.
'For Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.' By indolence the
moral principle is weakened, and the impulse of passion is increased.
Indolence is the gateway through which a troop of evil spirits gain
admission to the citadel, and compel conscience to surrender to evil desire.
Activity in honorable pursuits strengthens moral principle—makes the
conscience vigilant—and furnishes a shield of defense impregnable to the
assaults of the tempter. Impoverishment has, in some cases, counteracted the
causes of indolence; and if there be a spark of youthful fire in the soul,
the stimulant of 'necessity' will operate as a spur to vigorous action.
Hence it is, that from the low walks of life have risen some of the greatest
statesmen, most learned divines, and gifted geniuses in every department of
human action. Their poverty has been the spring of their exertions. Though
denied in youth the advantages which wealth commands, they have found more
than an equivalent in their own unconquerable aspirations. What seemed to be
an obstacle became an impulse; and the impediments in their paths to
usefulness and reputation, which would have frightened back less noble
spirits, only seemed like the interposing Alps in the march of Hannibal—to
make their victory more glorious and more complete. Oh that I could reach
the ear of every youth in the land, wake up in his soul those generous
desires, and urge him to those active exertions, which should be at once his
safe-guard from temptation and the pledge of his success." (Considerations
for Young Men)
VII. On leaving home and
entering on the business of life, or preparing to enter upon it,
young men are apt to form too high
an estimate of the importance of wealth, and to make the acquisition of it
the supreme, if not the exclusive object of existence.
Ours is emphatically a money-making country. By far the greater part, if not
the whole, of those who read these pages, will be found among the middle
classes—young men who leave a father's house, not to seek fame or rank—but
wealth. Their feeling is, "I am going out to learn and try to get a
fortune—to take my chance in the world's lottery, with the hope of drawing a
prize." To this they are directed, perhaps, and stimulated by their parents,
who send them forth, virtually, with this admonition—"Go, my son, and get
rich."
Perhaps the son has seen no other object of desire or
pursuit before the eyes of his parents—has heard no other commended—and has
been placed in a situation where the attraction of no other object could be
felt. Money, money, money has been held up to him as the highest good of
human life—and he goes out eager to obtain its possession. But even without
being thus sworn in and consecrated in childhood on the altar of Mammon; and
when all that they have seen and heard in the house of their father is
opposed to the notion, youth, in general, can with difficulty be persuaded
that to learn to get money is not the only object, or the highest end, of
their leaving home.
Riches are the bright vision, which, seen in the distant
prospect, call forth their aspirations, and make them willing to sacrifice
the endearments of their father's house. They have no ideas of greatness, of
happiness, of respectability—apart from wealth—which is the standard of
everything valuable with them. The hope of being a rich man is the nerve of
their industry, the spur to their energies, the reconciling thought that
makes them wipe from their brow with joy, the memorial of the curse of
earth. And should we cut this nerve of effort, and paralyze these energies?
Should we take from the heart this desire and expectation of success? Should
we quench the ardor of youth, and make life a dreary wilderness—pathless,
objectless, hopeless? No! Money has proper attractions. It is the gift of
God. When sought in subordination to a higher end of life, by honest
industry, and as a means of modest gratification and of benevolent effort,
it is a blessing to its owners and to others. But when it is wealth for its
own sake that is set up as the object of existence; when it is loved for
itself; when that love is an absolute passion; when it takes such hold of
the inner man as to thrust out and cast down every moral principle, every
noble sentiment, every honorable emotion, and every subject which relates to
our immortal destiny; then it is a low and sordid passion, a groveling
ambition, a contraction of mind, of itself unworthy a rational, much more an
immortal being—and in its influence will benumb the conscience, harden the
heart, and ruin the soul.
In a case where you cannot have experience of your own to
guide you, be willing, young man—to profit by the experience of others. Is
there a subject about which the testimony of mankind is more concurrent, or
on which they have delivered their testimony more spontaneously and
emphatically, than the insufficiency of wealth to satisfy the soul?
Has not this been proclaimed by the contentment of millions who have had
little—and the restlessness and dissatisfaction of thousands who have had
much? Does not Solomon, as the foreman of that countless jury which has sat
in judgment upon the world's claim, deliver the verdict in those impressive
words, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
Not that I mean to say wealth contributes nothing to our
felicity, either by lessening the evils, or multiplying the comforts, of
life. It does contribute something, and it may be lawfully sought after, for
as much as it can yield. My remarks go only to prove that it is not the
chief good, and to dissuade the young from considering and treating it as
such in the outset of life. It may be useful as one of the golden vessels
with which to serve yourselves, your neighbors, or your Lord. But it must
not become a golden idol—to be set up and worshiped instead of Jehovah. I do
not wish you to become careless or inactive in business, or even indifferent
to the increase of your possessions. But what I aim at, is to convince you
that wealth is not the supreme end of life, and that it is infinitely less
desirable than an inheritance laid up in heaven. If you make wealth the end
of life, you may miss it after all, and even in reference to your own
selected object, live in vain. While if you succeed and actually become
wealthy, you will still miss the end for which God created you—and lavish
existence upon an idol, which cannot save you when you most need its help.
You may cry to it in your affliction—but it will have no ears to hear. You
may call upon it in your dying hour—but it will have no power to
commiserate, and to turn the ebbing tide of life. You may invoke it at the
day of judgment—but it shall be only to be a swift witness against you. You
may think of it in eternity—but it will only be to feel it to be "the gold
which cankers," and the "rust which shall eat your flesh."
Such, then, are some of the minor dangers—if indeed I can
with propriety call them so, when they entail such consequences as I have
stated. But what I mean is, that they are not so directly and flagrantly
immoral in their tendency and effects as those previously enumerated. Look
at them, young men! Weigh them with deliberation. And may God, in answer to
your earnest prayers, grant you his grace for your protection and
preservation!
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