Not Doing Enough to Do It Well
It is one of the commonplaces that we ought to consider quality rather than quantity. But this antithesis is not so sharp as we are disposed to think. The very reason the quality of some acts is so poor is simply that the quantity of them is so small. A thing has to be done often to do it well. Excellence never comes from doing a thing at very rare intervals, but from doing it so often that it becomes instinctive. Well-doing, after all, means much-doing, little as we are inclined to think so, and inattention to this vulgar matter of quantity is just what is impoverishing the work of many who have a real appreciation of excellence, but who do not know enough about how it is attained. The surest way to do a thing well is to do it often enough. Who ever heard of a great preacher who was made so by preaching as seldom as possible? The best preaching comes from those who preach a good deal. There never was a great orator who became such by limiting himself to a half-dozen monumental occasions. Webster touched his high-water mark at last simply because of the number of times he had tried to do his best. Wendell Phillips had to have a hundred nights of delivery behind him before his great lecture on the “Lost Arts” became his greatest lecture. The world might never have known much about it if, in order to protect its quality, he had decided to give it only twice. When a young writer offers himself for training in English, he is not told to write as seldom as possible, but to write a theme a day, and to get saturated with English, and not to expect much in the way of quality until he has behind him many efforts, most of which have been failures or half-successes. We have to do a great deal more than the one thing needful if we are ever to do that one needful thing. The trouble with much of our Bible teaching, for example, is that the teacher studies with all his might the one portion of Scripture which is before him, and nothing more. He studies his lesson faithfully, and can not see why more does not come of it. And so we get just as good Bible teaching as can be expected until one studies vastly more of the Bible than he can ever directly use in the teaching of the lesson. Sometimes it comes over us what a mysterious thing the scriptural quality is. We feel that we want that steady and instinctive atmosphere of the divine which is the natural air of the Bible. So we go straightway to find it all in some chapter or verse, and for a little we feel the glow of it; but it is soon shut off. Then we begin to realize that it is not acquired by any casual forays into that region, but only by keeping ourselves in it and steeping ourselves in it for years. Those who knew him best, said they found Joseph Parker forever turning over the Bible. And Boyd Carpenter speaks of “the hard path of daily and persevering personal study of the Bible” as necessary to any large success in getting its real quality out of it. Like all other great influences, the Bible is apt to baffle those who use it only a little. All this applies especially to the religious life. Why is it that when we have done so many things that are individually right and desirable, they yet seem to count for so little? It is simply because they are done so seldom. People do a great many individual things which are all that could be desired. They know that they are well done and sincerely done, yet they do not seem to count for much. Why? Because they are so occasional. There is no steady output of that sort of thing, so that they can be marked by it and counted on for it. Nobody knows how far they will go, and people pay little attention to any one’s influence until they have found out how far he intends to go. It will take a deal of repetition to reassure them on that point. People stop easily. They do good things, and leave us mystified as to why they do not do more. They take part in religious services, they have fits of going to church. Sometimes they will pray for a season, and the results are evident. Then everything cools down, and nobody knows what to make of it. They don’t do enough to do it well. And we don’t know what they will do next. At times they do as well as anybody, but they do not do it often enough to make us feel perfectly assured as to their quality. Emerson said that what he wanted in a writer was “a sense of mass,” that is, enough of his product to enable one to make out just what sort of product it was. In order to form a judgment we need fulness of materials upon which to judge. We want to think the best about people, and therefore we wish they would give us a little more to go upon. And they wish the same of us. Do we keep on long enough and repeat our best often enough really to assure them what we mean, and what they can count upon, and that we mean business? Do we not confuse those upon whom we really desire to exert a good influence, just because of this spasmodic character of our doings? We do not make clear what we mean by simple persistence and continuance in well-doing. We seem to think that we have sufficiently put ourselves on record when we have done it once or twice. Well-doing, in order to be effectual, needs momentum. Like a ship, we need to have enough motion to furnish steerageway. But too many of us stop just as soon as we have had a success or done one good deed. That seems to settle it to our satisfaction that we can do it if necessary; yet before we know it we have lost steerageway, and life is no longer under control, but is courting disaster. “Ye were running well,” says Paul to the Galatians; “who hindered you?” They had proved that they could do well when they tried, but, like so many of us, they had not yet proved anything about that quality of which the New Testament makes so much,—the ability to do it again, and to keep on doing it. When, therefore, we have been successful in anything, it is no time to sit down and survey the scene with contentment, as if to say that everything is now settled. If we are wise, we shall ask ourselves how long we can keep this up. It is the question of quantity, and it is not the vulgar question we have sometimes thought it to be. Because we have thought ourselves above asking it, we have often fallen below our mark in respect to quality. We sat down and gloated over our achievement instead of swiftly adding to it the other attainments that would keep it alive and powerful. That is the secret of much failure. We did not do enough to do it well. Our intentions were right, and we had the ability, but we missed this point, and so we lost ground in spite of much excellence. For the greatest element in well-doing is continuance in it.—Sunday School Times.