p. 100 | The Folly of Excuses by Rev. Geo. P. Hayes

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 2, 1882

The Folly of Excuses.

By Rev. Geo. P. Hayes

NEXT to the weakness of making excuses is the weakness of accepting them. To be of any use, an excuse should remedy the evil which calls for explanation. Reflection will show that a case can hardly be conceived of where any excuse will effect that end. No matter what excuse Grouchy might have been able to give to Napoleon for failing to come to his aid at Waterloo, the excuse could not reverse the historic defeat. The fact was, he was not there at the crucial moment and the result was the same as if he was absent without excuse. Nature's government is the perfection of government; and she excuses nothing. The common law maxim, that "ignorance of the law doth not excuse," is enforced by nature as it is enforced nowhere else. We relieve no disaster by apologies. We take poison with the best intentions, and die just as if we intended to commit suicide. Malaria is all around us and it affects us just as if we had gone there on purpose, although we may actually be on an errand of mercy. Though thrust by another's unintentional awkwardness against the heated stove, it burns us as if we had planned it in malice.

The contrast between this natural government and most human government is very marked. At home children are taught by their acceptance to present excuses often forged and false; and they grow up believing that to refuse to accept them is a cruel hardship. At school the same course of false training is kept up, and they come to think that a good excuse is as good as a good deed. By and by they go out from home and school; and as a rule society refuses to accept excuses from all who offer them, and yet insists on their being accepted by all to whom they are offered. The parable of the unmerciful servant is thoroughly human. This morning I read a bitter criticism on the governmental management of a reformatory institution by a business man who has the reputation of never keeping a clerk who has to offer excuses for faults and failures. Yet here is a school which cannot expel its pupils which in his judgment could get along without any punishment in its control of the incorrigible inmates. We can only be taught the absolute necessity of diligent foresight by the refusal to accept or offer excuses. Nature controls all of us. When we go into a room to a stove we first touch it lightly to find out whether it is warm or not before we lean our hand on it. When we go to a new country we inquire what fruits are wholesome before we eat them. So shipwrecked sailors watch what berries the birds pick to find out what are healthful and harmless. When we travel in new lands we inquire into their laws to save ourselves from the penalties of the courts. By this method the responsibility of knowledge is put upon the subject. In most homes the responsibility of knowledge is laid upon those who are to govern. So parents hold teachers responsible for being sure that the rules of the school are known by their children before they are held guilty for their violation. The result of this vicious method of home training is that these same children have to learn in the bitter school of hard experience that excuses do not count. Half the grumblers and complainers who fill the world with the story of their unappreciated talents can only justify their own estimate of their abilities on the ground that an excuse is as good as a success. Alas for them, however, society looks at their failures and refuses to entrust them with any great office, and they are unwilling to discharge anything but great obligations.

It is sometimes said for another purpose, "nothing succeeds like success." But the truth is nothing succeeds but success. Failure is failure, and that is all anyone can say. It may well, therefore, be questioned whether it would not be well for us all at once to resolve that in no case shall we offer an excuse. It would do all mankind good in their own thoughts of themselves to call their failures failures. This would at once change the use to which the reasons of failure would be put. Now they are employed as excuses to ourselves and others. Then they would be so many lessons toward wiser methods for the future. This at least seems sure, that we have no warrant from nature or revelation that excuses are acceptable to the Ruler of the universe. No excuse seems to be sufficient for the rejection of his Son. The Judgment will not only reject poor excuses, but it will reject all excuses. Then the saved will be saved and the lost will be lost. Who ever heard

of an excuse that the Bible gave good reason to believe would be sufficient to save the offerer, and so a substitute for Christ? In the next world, as in this, things will be dealt with in their true character. If now we needlessly build for shelter on some unstable foundation, we are left without time to rebuild when the floods are upon us; so then the wood, hay, stubble, will consume away before our eyes and we be without remedy. It is this fact of their future utter uselessness that makes it so evil in us to teach our children to offer and rely on excuses. For this life and the next this vicious element in our unconscious education is only and always evil. The harm we do to them and, indeed, to all we so treat as to encourage reliance on excuses by accepting them from others or offering them to others, can only be repaired by their learning better habits by sad humiliations and bitter failures. To decline all excuses and call a failure a failure is nature's way, and the quickest way to develop the utmost practical caution and foresight.—Rev. Geo. P. Hayes, in Christian Union.