p. 669 | Health and Temperance by Dr. Talmage

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 5, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 42.

Health and Temperance.

By Dr. Talmage

The Hot Axle.

THE express train was flying from Cork to Queenstown; it was going like sixty—that is, about sixty miles an hour. No sight of Irish village to arrest our speed, no sign of breakdown; and yet the train halted. We looked out of the window; saw the brakeman and a crowd of passengers gathering around the locomotive, and a dense smoke arising. What was the matter? A hot axle!

I thought then, as I think now, that is what is the matter with the people everywhere. In the swift "express," American life, we go too fast for our endurance. We think ourselves getting on splendidly, when, in the midst of our successes, we come to a dead halt. What is the matter? The nerves or muscles or brains give out; we have made too many revolutions in an hour. A hot axle!

Men make the mistake of working according to their opportunities, and not according to their capacity of endurance. "Can I run this train from Springfield to Boston at the rate of fifty miles an hour?" says an engineer. "Yes." "Then I will run it reckless of consequences!" "Can I be a merchant, and a president of a bank, and a director in a life insurance company, and a school commissioner, and help edit a paper, and supervise the politics of our ward, and run for Congress?" "I can!" the man says to himself. The store drives him; the bank drives him; the school drives him; politics drive him. He takes all the scoldings and frets and exasperations of each position. Some day, at the height of the business season, he does not come to the store. From the most important meeting of the bank directors he is absent. In the excitement of the most important political canvass he fails to be at the place appointed. What is the matter? His health has broken down; the train halts long before it gets to the station. A hot axle!

Literary men have great opportunities opening in this day. If they take all that open, they are dead men, or worse—living men who ought to be dead. The pen runs so easy when you have good ink and smooth paper, and an easy desk to write on, and the consciousness of an audience of one, two, or three hundred thousand readers. There are the religious newspapers through which you may preach, and the musical journals through which you may sing, and the agricultural periodicals through which you can plow, and family newspapers in which you may romp with the whole household around the evening stand. There are critiques to be written, and reviews to be indulged in, and poems to be chimed. When out of a man's pen he can shake recreation and friendship and usefulness and bread, he is apt to keep it shaking. So great are the invitations to literary work, that the professional men of the day are overdone. They sit, faint and fagged out, on the verge of newspapers and books; each one does the work of three. And these men sit up late nights, and choke down chunks of meat without mastication, and scold their wives through irritability, and maul innocent authors, and run the physical machinery with a liver miserably given out. The driving-shaft has gone fifty times a second. They stop at no station. The steam-chest is hot and swollen. The brain and the digestion begin to smoke. Stop, ye flying quills! "Down brake!" A hot axle!

Some of our young people have read—till they are crazed—of learned blacksmiths, who, at the forge, conquered thirty languages; and of shoemakers, who, pounding sole-leather, got to be philosophers; and of milliners, who, while their customers were at the glass trying on spring hats, wrote a volume of first-rate poems. The fact is, no blacksmith ought to be troubled with more than five languages; and instead of shoemakers becoming philosophers, we would like to turn our surplus of philosophers into shoemakers; and the supply of poetry is so much greater than the demand that we wish milliners would stick to their business. Extraordinary examples of endurance may do as much harm as good. Because Napoleon slept only four hours a night, hundreds of students have tried the experiment; but instead of Austerlitz and Sarragossa, there came of it only a sick headache and a botch of a recitation.