ROBERT COLLYER

CLEAR GRIT

[Lecture by Robert Collyer, pastor of the Church of the Messiah, New York, since 1879 (born in Keighly, Yorkshire, England, December 8, 1823; -), delivered originally during his pastorate of the Unity Church, Chicago (1860-1879), and in later years repeated with variations in text many times on many platforms in various parts of the country.]

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:-Clear Grit, as I understand it, and propose to speak of it in this lecture, may be defined as the best there is in a man, blossoming into the best he can do in a sweet and true fashion, as a rose blossoms on a bush or a bird sings in a tree.

It is that fine quality in a man or woman that can never give way except in a true fashion and for good reason; the power to walk barefoot over the flints that lie on the true line of life, rather than to go through soft and flowery ways that deflect from it.

Clear Grit is the power to say No to what may seem to be a multitude of angels when they would counsel you away from a downright loyalty to your instant duty, while if it were possible for you to feel that by following steadily the true path, for all that you can see, you will go into outer darkness and stay there. But that unspeakable felicity may crown the false way, to make no argument about one way or the other, but simply to determine once for all that any torment for being a true man or woman, is to be preferred to any bliss for failing.

Now, you will understand from this, of course, that there is a false and a true in grit, as there is in all great and good things in creation, and that we need to know

Copyright, 1901, by A. C. Butters.

the one from the other, as the prime condition of being clear grit at all. In Westall's splendid designs for "Paradise Lost," if you have ever seen them, you will remember that in one of them Satan, as he stands on the burning marl with his hand lifted and shouts to his fallen host, is still a mighty angel, erect and strong, and not to be distinguished from his unfallen peers, except for the shadow that begins to pass over his face out of his darkened soul. It is the painter's way of telling a truth we have all seen some time in our life. The truth men like Aaron Burr and Lord Byron, and others I might name, have made clear to us through their lives, that there is nothing in this world so nearly like a splendid angel as a splendid devil.

When I worked at the anvil, as a boy, we would sometimes show the boys who came in with their horses to shoe, a great wonder. We would take a nail-rod and make it white hot; but, then, instead of making a nail, we would plunge the iron, hot as it was, into a pan of brimstone, and it would turn to mere slag. It was the truth I want to teach about clear grit in a crucible. The substance out of which you can forge all sorts of noble things shall be in two men just about alike, and in both it shall be capable of growing white hot under some intense pressure of soul or circumstance. But one man shall dip this substance of his manhood into some infernal element and it will all turn to cinder, while the other man will make what will be like a nail in a sure place.

So Clear Grit, as I think of it, is never base or mean, either in its nature or tendency. Whatever it may be that you compress into this compact vernacular of two syllables, here is the point where you get at the rights of it; the scratch of the diamond that cuts into everything except a diamond. A man may have all sorts of shining qualities; he may be as handsome as Apollo, as plausible as Mercury, and as full of fight as Mars, yet this shall show you, when you scratch him, he is a bit of mere shining paste and no diamond at all; or his faults and failings may be an everlasting regret to those who love him best, as they are in a man like Robert Burns. But because there's Clear Grit in him, because there's a bit of manhood running through his life, as grand and good as ever

struggled through this world of ours toward a better; a heart that could gather everything that lives within the circle of its mighty sympathy, from a mouse shivering down there in the furrow, to a saint singing up yonder in Heaven; because there's a heart like that in him, we cling to his knees, we will not let him go; sin-smitten, but mighty, manful man as he is, we gather him into our heart, every one of us, and love him with an everlasting love. [Applause.]

Then, as I am led to see how Clear Grit comes to be an intimate part of your life and mine, I have to trace the root of it, first of all, to a certain austerity and self-denial in our personal character and life. There was a story many years ago going the round of our papers, about a black man who was traveling on one of the Sound steamers from New York to Boston, and found there was no room for him in a stateroom, upstairs or down, and no such chance of his getting comfortably through the night as there would have been for a decent yellow dog. It was a wild night, and was getting dark, when one of the officers on the steamer discovered this man trying to make the best of it in as snug a corner as he could find, pitied his forlorn condition, and thought he would try to help him. He noticed he was not so very black, so he hit on a plan for giving him a stateroom. There would be no sort of trouble about an Indian if he should come and look as well, generally, as this negro did. And so he said to himself, "I will run him in as an Indian." He went up to the man, looked him in the eyes, and said: "You are an Indian, ain't you?" Well, Douglass, for it was Fred, saw in an instant what the man was after. I don't know how he felt, but I know exactly how I should have felt if I had been in his place. I should have felt like giving a little nod, and saying, "Well, yes, I guess I'm an Indian." But what this black man did was to look right back into the eyes of the officer, and say: "No, I'm a nigger," to curl himself up as the officer turned and left him, and get what comfort he could in his gusty nest. [Applause.] Now there you touch the first thing I know of in Clear Grit, and that is the power and the will to say No to every temptation toward a good time that can come between a man and his manhood.

And I think these temptations usually begin down among our passions and appetites. I suppose it is not a rule without an exception that the man who cares most of all about himself, cares very little about anybody else; or that in proportion to the fuss a man makes about his dinner, for instance, is the utter worthlessness of that man to have any decent woman cook for him. I think a very fair sort of man may sometimes make a fuss about his dinner, and my dear wife thought so, too. Isaac Walton said "that very good dishes should only be eaten by very good men," and that's the reason I have sometimes thought that when we ministers go round to one of the best houses in the parish about tea-time, as we sometimes do, and are invited to stay to tea, which we generally do, the good lady is sure to bring out her best cakes and preserves, and to broil her tenderest chicken. She knows what dear old Walton knew, that very good things should only be eaten by very good men, so the minister gets them, of course. [Laughter and applause.] And thinks, no doubt, as St. Thomas à Becket thought, when a man saw him eating the breast of a pheasant as if he liked it very much, and said to him sourly: "That is no dinner for a saint of the Church." "One man," the saint replied, may be a glutton on horse-beans, while another man may eat the breast of a pheasant like a gentleman, and be a good man all the same."

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All this is true, of course, but it is no less true that the devouring determination in a great majority of men and women nowadays to have a good time in getting every good thing they hanker after, and dirt-cheap at that, if they can, is one of the most dangerous evils we have to encounter if we want, above all things in this world, to be Clear Grit. "It is a fortunate thing for the world," a man of another race and nation said to Thomas Guthrie, the fine old Scotchman, "that you Anglo-Saxons eat and drink so much, because you have such a genius for hard work and for going ahead in everything you take hold of, that, if it were not for this, the nations round about. would have no chance to compete with you. You would be the masters of the world." Well, it was true, no doubt, and only one truth of a good many that belong to this side of our character and our life.

Now, let us see how this works. I went to live in Chicago when the population numbered about a hundred thousand souls. I lived there twenty years, so that I was quite intimate with the life of that great city. In the early times I think I knew every man who had come to the front, and was wielding a real power of any sort for good. I do not remember one among them who did not begin his life as a poor man's son. They all came up, so far as I could trace them, without any good time at all, except as boys ought to have a good time in growing strong as a steel bar on plenty of wholesome work and what we should call hard fare; fighting their way to an education through a great deal of effort, and then, when they were ready, coming out West from the East with that half-dollar in their pocket, and that little lot of things done up in a valise that you will notice every young fellow is said to start with, who ends by making his mark or making a fortune. [Applause.] A great German writer says that riches are always harder on youth than poverty, and that many a man sees now he would not for much money have had much money in his youth. "When we started the ‘Edinburgh Review,'" Sidney Smith says, "we thought of putting this motto on the cover: 'We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal,' but it was so literally true that we concluded not to tell." And John Bryant, of Princeton, in Illinois, told me once that when his brother, William Cullen Bryant, was a young man, he durst not have taken a five years' lease of his life; but William, he said, adopted the habits of a Spartan, omitting, of course, the stealing. He would take some brown bread and butter, with a glass of milk or water, for his breakfast, then he would do a bit of real hard work, and then go down to his office; and, with very little alteration, John thought he was keeping up that habit down to the time that we had the talk, and thought also that this had a great deal to do with both the length and the worth of his brother's most noble career. "I shall be glad if you will stay and dine with me, but when my wife is away, I just browse around," Mr. Lincoln said once to a friend. when he was President of the Republic and living in the White House in Washington. "Just browse around!" How much that fine temperance in eating and drinking,