Reaching for a Higher Level

REACHING FOR A HIGHER LEVEL By a Father to His Son [A leading citizen's son is now attending college. On a recent visit home, he wrote a personal letter, as a composition theme, and let his father go over it for correction. Therein the boy laid bare the nature of his present dislike for school. From his sister, who is with him, his parents learned of his forming a hurtful habit. These facts led his father to write him the following letter. It is so good and so to the point that we think it should be shared by hundreds of other mothers' sons; and so, with the consent of the parents, we present it in the pages of the Improvement Era, where all may learn its value. — Editors.] My Dear Boy: — I have been thinking about the personal letter you prepared while at home, as a theme for your teacher in English, and what you wrote in that letter made me recall a certain trying year in my educational experience when I was* about your age. It was my third year in the Brigham Young Academy, at Provo, and corresponded roughly to the present sophomore year of the high school. My feelings were apparently just like what you seem to feel now in your first year in college. I wanted to quit school once for all and get on a farm, do stunts as a cowboy, drive a big freight team, or go to work in a mine. I felt, "What's the use? I already have a better education than my father had, better than nine-tenths of the men of my acquaintance have, and yet they are all getting along fine." But pure stubbornness saved me. I had by this time formu- lated some practical rules of life, and my fellow students had widely copied them, or rather had asked me to inscribe them, into the re- membrance albums that all students kept in those days. These rules were: "Get at it. Stick to it. Finish it. Don't worry." I couldn't very well go back on them, so I pushed against the stream until a time came, after several months, when I again loved to study; and mental investigations and thinking have ever since been the big joy of my life. Some years later, that great teacher and scholar, Dr. G. Stanley Hall, came to the B. Y. U. as a summer lecturer; and among many other wonderful things, of mind and heart, he left with me a message tied up in this very unique phrase, viz: "The Progressive Prolongation of Ephebic Ferment." It took me a year to fathom its full meaning, but when I did, I made it the subject of an oft-repeated lecture through- out the towns of Utah. Ephebic was coined by Dr. Hall from Phoebus Apollo, who stands for the idea of perpetual youth; ferment was the word he chose for that mental and spiritual awakening which comes with ado- lescence to every boy or girl who is fated to do things in this life; progressive prolongation explains itself as a continuance of the ad- olescent state of mind and heart, even unto old age, making and keep-

REACHING FOR A HIGHER LEVEL 611 ing the man or woman young in spirit and ever growing, in spite of what may betide the body. The possibility of such progress I con- ceived and still believe to be the greatest gift of God to man. Unfortunately, of the millions that teem the walks of life, most of whom at your present age feel in some measure the divine surge of adolescence — and so, for a brief glimpse at least, see the world in brilliant colors, — only one here and there keeps green and hopeful in spirit to the end of life. For the ninety out of every hundred, the world soon turns grey, and life becomes fixed and hum- drum; in other words, their souls become immured in the clay of their bodies, like the coral polyp; which, however, does have the power of emerging upward through an aperture in its head, and so begins to build again. Let us hope that the analogy of this latter oper- ation is, for these earth-incrusted mortals, the release which we com- monly call death. Well, when I understood the possibility of prolonging the mental aspect of adolescence, I resolved that this ferment should re- main with me throughout life, and I believe that it has. I am today as quick to adopt the new, and as ready to quit the old — should I find it false — as I was at twenty-one. Moreover, as this message sank into my consciousness, I went back into my own personal history, and found out why I almost quit and settled down to the little old — centuries old — treadmill of existence. My ancestors, for no doubt a thousand generations, had quit fermenting at a certain age, and thereafter sat it out, so to speak, on their haunches; consequently when that due time came, this same paralyzing sandbar loomed up before the wave of my spiritual progress and almost halted me; almost, but not quite, for as I have already explained I finally washed it out of my path, so that my mem- tal life might flow on. Nor have I ever felt its clogging power since. Your mother's ancestors were for the most part men and women to whom the intellectual life was the natural life — Sir Robert Peel type, for instance — and so she probably never encountered the hard- pan that almost stopped my mental roots from going deeply downward (if I may thus vary the metaphor of my life-struggle). I had hoped, therefore, ever since he was a little lad, that my son might escape that terrific combat of the spirit against the inertia of the body. This struggle seems not to be in the path of Calista or of Dorothy, and we have yet to see how it will affect the youngsters now at home. But it has evidently come to you. In that very ex- pressive slang, you are up against it, and the challenge is to the very centre of your being. I got help from my Father in heaven, and without it I don't believe I should have won out. When this struggle comes hardest to you, tell me, my son, don't you immediately crave a cigarette? And after you have inhaled its fumes, does not the struggle pass? Is not the world smooth and comfortable again? Continue to meet the issue in that way, and you

612 IMPROVEMENT ERA will have lost out forever; and what is more you will always smoke thereafter, — whatever be your boast of manliness today — just for the anodyne of putting the very memory of your failure out of mind. In that single fact lies the insidious hellishness of the nicotine habit; it kills ambition and makes us satisfied with things as they are. I have been through it all, and know what I am talking about. Thus far, my boy, I have written — in disguised terms perhaps — ■ on the psychology of eternal progress, which, as you are yet to know, is the very heart and soul of "Mormon ism." Permit me now, as your father, to point out some significant mental distinctions. Science divides your soul life into knowing, feeling, and willing. The first has to do with the enlargement of your mental horizon; the second with the satisfying of your desires and emotions; the third, specifically with the lifting of yourself daily into higher things. "Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll ! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!" This daily outgrowing of the shell of the body is the poet's way of picturing eternal progress. The purely knowledge aspect of the soul has something to do with it; so also has the purely emotional aspect; but after all is said that may be said, the real lifting power is in the will. The first may give the vision, the second will make the vision seem desirable, but only by the third can the vision pass over into achievement. To be captain of one's soul, if the expressive phrase be trans- lated into terms of daily growth, mean self-denial rather than self- indulgence; especially in relation to the house in which the captain dwells. You meet men every day who cannot stop to exchange ideas for three minutes without rolling a cigarette. These men are already hopelessly dead in this life — I mean as to their eternal spirits — en- tombed, as they are, behind walls which are daily cemented more strongly with nicotine mortar. Are you going to be in that group? Every little while I sur- prise your mother in her room, weeping and praying for you: "O Daddy, why don't you write to our boy." Well, I have written; but I hesitated long, realizing how im- patiently the modern young man sweeps aside any attempt at parental guidance. And after all, I ask myself, what good will it do? For in effect you know enough already to guide you in doing. I can only hope my words will bring that knowledge sharply to the front. The cigarette slave is never set free through adding knowledge to knowledge; a single smoke will neutralize the wisest and sharpest counsel in the world, and so make him comfortable again. The problem, my boy, is up to your will; but a tobacco will — which

REACHING FOR A HIGHER LEVEL 613 I don't believe you have as yet — is weak as water. Better enlist the help of the Lord in this fight. Listen to this definition of the gospel: It is "the power of God unto salvation." Paul's condensed phrase means: the power which God gives instantly to those who call upon him from the deeps of the soul, when confronted with some act of self-denial which their own souls are not heroic enough to achieve; a self-denial which, however, is necessary to that day's or that hour's or that minute's salvation. Try it out, my boy, and remember this lesson about the pro- gressive prolongation of ephebic ferment. It is the meaning of eternal progress. Lovingly, Your Father. Memory Pictures When I set me down at twilight, And the day is nearly o'er, Recollections so enthrall me That I live my past once more. Soon before me looms a fireside, Memories of childhood dear, With the prattle of sweet voices And the bed-time tales I hear. And there flits before my vision Mother's face, so soft and mild, And I long to share her kisses As I did when but a child. There was never such another In the annals of my past, None so willing to forgive me Or to help me to the last. Mother always was so faithful, Though her life was one of care, That she healed our various ailments With her humble work and prayer. So I learned my lesson early, That there's nothing to compare With the help one gets from mother Through her services and prayer. Now I miss that gentle mother And her loving warm embrace. But I never shall forget her Nor her sweet, unselfish face. So I often sit at twilight When the lights are dim and low, Just to see the memory pictures As they softly come and go. Menan, Idaho ELSIE M. LARSEN.