Luck and Pluck | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 9, 1863

Luck and Pluck.

THESE are common words, and suggest a common subject. We are common men and women, and wish to take a common view of it.

Since we were boys and girls we have heard of luck. Our fathers and mothers talked of good luck and bad luck, of lucky and unlucky days. What was meant we did not exactly understand, nor is it probable they did; but the most vivid impression conveyed was, that things happened so and so; some happened well and some happened ill, without any particular cause; or, in other words, certain things chanced to be as we wished, while other things chanced to be contrary to our desires, undirected by any steady and unvarying laws.

The word luck is suggestive of a want of law. This idea has passed into many common proverbs, such as these: "It is more by hit than good wit;" "It is as well to be born lucky as rich;" "Fortune is a fickle jade;" "Risk nothing, win nothing;" and more of a similar import, all ignoring the grand rule of law, and resting on the atheistical idea of chance.

Our fathers were good, religious people, and did not mean to foster atheism when they talked about luck, and gave a half-way assent to its godless reality. If the universe were an infinite chaos; if order had no throne in its wide realm; if universal law were a fable of fancy; if God were a Babel, or the world a Pandemonium, there might be such a thing as luck. But while from the particle to the globe, from the animalcule to the archangel, there is not a being or a thing, a time or an event, disconnected from the great government of eternal law and order, we cannot see how such a game of chance as the word luck supposes, can be admitted into any corner of the great world. Luck! What is it? A lottery? A hap-hazard? A frolic of gnomes? A blind-man's-buff among the laws? A ruse among the elements? A trick of dame Nature? Has any scholar defined luck, any philosopher explained its nature, any chemist shown us its elements? Is luck that strange, nondescript unmateriality that does all things among men that they cannot account for? If so, why does not luck make a fool speak words of wisdom; an ignoramus utter lectures on philosophy; a stupid dolt write the great works of music and poetry; a double-fingered dummy create the beauties of art, or an untutored savage the wonders of mechanism?

If we would go into a country where the sluggard's farm is covered with the richest grains and fruits, and where industry is rewarded only with weeds and brambles; where the drunkard looks sleek and beautiful, and his home cheerful and happy, while temperance wears the haggard face and eats the bread of want and misery; where labor starves, while idleness is fed and grows fat; where common sense is put upon the pillory, while twaddle and moonshine are raised to distinction; where genius lies in the gutter, and ignorance soars to the skies; where virtue is incarcerated in prison, while vice is courted and wooed by the sunlight, we might possibly believe that luck had something to do there. But where we see, as we everywhere do in our world, the rewards of industry, energy, wisdom, and virtue, constant as the warmth in sunlight or beauty in flowers, we must deny in toto the very existence of this good and evil essence which men have called luck.

Was it luck that gave Girard and Astor, Rothschild and Gray, their vast wealth? Was it luck that won victories for Washington, Wellington, and Napoleon? Was it luck that carved Venus de Medici, that wrote the "Æneid," "Paradise Lost," and "Festus"? Was it luck that gave Morse his telegraph, or Fulton his steamboat, or Franklin the lightning for his play-thing? Is it luck that gives the merchant his business, the lawyer his clients, the minister his hearers, the physician his patients, the mechanic his labor, the farmer his harvest? Nay, verily. No man believes it. And yet many are the men who dream of luck, as though such a mysterious spirit existed, and did sometimes humor the whims of visionary cowards and drones.

Many are the young men who waste the best part of their lives in attempts to woo this coy maid into their embraces. They enter into this, or that, or the other speculation, with the dreamy hope that luck will pay them a smiling visit. Some go to California, or Australia, or the "Far West," or to the Torrid or the Frigid Zone, or some wondrous, away-off place, with no fair prospect or hope of success from their own energies and exertions, but depending almost wholly on a gentle smile from capricious luck. Poor fellows! they find that luck does not get so far from home.

Some less daring and more lazy loiter about home, drawl around town, or loll through the country, whose only trust or expectation is a shuffle of luck in their favor. They know they deserve nothing, yet with an impudence hard as brass they will pray to luck for a "windfall," or "fat office," or a "living," and foolishly wait for an answer. These are the men that make your gamblers, your house thieves, your counterfeiters, your gentlemen loafers. They are not the men that originally mean any harm. But they believe in luck, and their trust is in luck, and they are going to have it out of luck some way. They despised meanness at first, perhaps, as much as you and I do; but somebody told them of luck, and they believed, and lo! they got duped. Little by little they went over to meanness, waiting all the while for a shake of the hand from luck.

Some of the believers in luck, of more moral firmness, dally with all life's great duties, and so do about the same as nothing, but eat the bread of disappointment. They do a little at this business, and luck does not smile. They do a little at that, still luck keeps away. They do a little at something else, they hear not a foot-fall from luck. And so they fritter away time and life. These are the do-littles. Hard-working men they are frequently. It is with them as though they had started to go to a place a thousand miles distant, leading to which there are many roads. They set out at full speed on one road, go a few miles, and get tired, and so conclude to turn back and try another. And so they try one road after another, each time returning to the starting-place. In a little while it is too late to get there at the appointed time, and so they mope along the road they happen to be on till the day is over.

There is a bad philosophy in the world. Our boys are full of it; our young men are its victims; our middle-aged men have not outgrown it, and our old men cannot make themselves believed on it. It is the idea that the good which man needs, comes, or may come, some other way than by wise application and hard industry.

Besides the moral evil and intellectual stupor which come upon the men who adopt this philosophy of luck, their lives are embittered by constant forbodings of evil, clouds overshadow them; blue spirits of evil gather around them; they occasionally have strange fits of laughter, and at times enjoy a delirious happiness, when their natures break away from the cold load of doubt that is laid upon them. But they soon go back to the speculating, dreamy mood; they know not the joy of the man who trusts in his own good right arm; they know not the peace of him whose ambition is to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow; they feel not the exultation of him whose life is a constant series of victories over the impediments which oppose his progress. The exuberance of the honest laborer's spirits is not in their hearts. Again, their philosophy breeds dishonesty within them. They crave a good they do not earn; they pray to luck to give them what does not belong to them; their whole inward life is a constant craving wish for something to which they have no just claim. It is a morbid, feverish covetousness, which is very apt to end in the conclusion, "The world owes me a living, and a living I'll have," and so they go out to get a living as best they may. They fancy that every rich and honored man has got his good by some turn of luck, and hence they feel that he has no special right to his property or his honors, and so they will get either from him if they can. They look upon the world, not as a great hive of industry, where men are rewarded according to their labors and merits, but as a grand lottery, a magnificent scheme of chance, in which fools and idlers have as fair a show as talent and labor.

In my humble opinion this philosophy of luck is at the bottom of more dishonesty, wickedness, and moral corruption than anything else. It sows its seeds in youthful minds just at that visionary season when judgment has not been ripened by experience nor imagination corrected by wisdom. And it takes more minds from the great school-house of useful life, and more arms from the great workshop of human industry, than any other one thing to which the mind reverts. It is a moral palsy, against which every just man should arm himself. The cure of the evil is found in pluck.

It is not luck, but pluck, which weaves the web of life; it is not luck, but pluck, which turns the wheel of fortune. It is pluck that amasses wealth, that crowns men with honors, that forges the luxuries of life. I use the term pluck as synonymous with whole-hearted energy, genuine bravery of soul.

That man is to be pitied who is too fearful and cowardly to go out and do battle for an honest living and a competence in the great field of human exertion. He is the man of luck, bad luck. Poor fellow! He lost his luck when he lost his pluck. Good pluck is good luck. Bad pluck is bad luck. Many a man has lost his luck, but never while he had good pluck. Men lose their luck by letting their energies eke through bad habits and unwise projects. One man loses his luck in his late morning naps, another in his late evening hours. One man loses his luck in the bar-room, another in the ball-room; one down by the river holding the boyish fishing-rod, another in the woods chasing down the innocent squirrel. One loses his luck in folly, one in fashion, one in idleness, one in high living, one in dishonesty, one in brawls, one in sensualism, and a great many in bad management. Indeed bad management is at the bottom of nearly all bad luck. It is bad management to train up a family of bad habits, to eat out one's living, and corrupt his life. It is bad management to drink liquor, and eat tobacco, and smoke, and swear, and tattle, and visit soda-fountains, and cream-saloons, and brothels, and live high, and chase after the fashions, and fret, and scold, and get angry, and abuse people, and mind other people's business, and neglect one's own. It is bad management to expose one's health, or overtax one's powers, and get sick, and take drugs to get well; to be idle or extravagant, or mean, or dishonest. All these things tend to bring that evil genius which men call bad luck.

But notwithstanding all these species of bad management, if one has genuine pluck he can reform. The man of energy can quit his drams, and hold his temper, and direct his life by the maxims of common sense.

Moral courage is the right arm of reform. True reformers are men of pluck. All men should be reformers. Life, when properly understood, is one great work of reform. Reform is but another word for improvement, progress. Progress is life's business, life's duty, life's end. Luck is not progress. It is getting to the end without the journey; it is getting rich without making money; it is getting honors without deserving them; it is having good things without knowing how to use them. Such luck is an evil. It is no luck. Indeed, there is no luck. Life's great good is wrought out, aye, wrought on, the anvil of industry. We cannot cheat Providence of its rule. Life is a vineyard, and men are rewarded in it for what they do and deserve. Talent and labor gauge the pay. Fortunes are made, not won. Wealth and honors are not a fortune. Give them to a youth and he knows not how to use them. They will prove his ruin. Steal money, steal a million of dollars, and lock it up in your coffers, and with it you steal a curse. You will be poorer than before. No man knows how, or can know how, to use stolen money well. There is no receipt-book or commercial regulation in the universe by which it can be disposed of to profit. It must be a losing game. Wealth is not good, money is not a blessing. The good lies in knowing how to use it. Honors are of themselves of no avail. They are not a good. The good is in knowing how to wear them. Where wealth and honors come unearned and undeserved, they are not a good, nor can they be. They are an evil, and work a terrible ruin. An edged tool in a mechanic's hand is a good thing; but in the hand of the unskillful it is a danger. A steam-engine in the hand of its master is a useful machine; but to one

who knows not how to use it, it is an instrument of death.

The generous and noble horse, under the care of his groom, is a most useful animal; but the man unused to such creatures had better let him alone. So it is with the things men covet in this life. They are blessings only as they are wisely used. The good they confer is not in themselves, but in the using. To use them is the thing to learn. This can be learned no way except by patient application in their attainment and use.

The rule is, to learn how to use wealth, we must make it; to learn how to wear honors, we must earn them; to learn how to enjoy pleasures, we must create them. Out of ourselves the good comes. The fountain is within us. If we would drink the water we must draw it from the well. If we would have statuary, we must carve it; if we would have fame, we must do something to secure it. If we would live well in life, we must do well. If we would conquer, we must fight. Labor is the price of success. He who has pluck to labor, and labor wisely, has naught to fear. Men may be what they would be, and have what they would have, if they only will. All lies in the resolute will. The stalwart arm and the determined soul will work out life's greatest good. Good is in work. Not in the thing made or earned is the good, so much as in the making and earning. He who does the most is truly the wealthiest man. In activity is our bliss.

Idleness is death; activity is life. The worker is the hero. Luck lies in labor. This is the end. And labor the fruit of pluck. Luck and pluck, then, meet in labor. Pleasure blossoms on the tree of labor. Wisdom is its fruit. Thrones are built on labor. Kingdoms stand by its steady props. Homes are made by labor. Every man of pluck will make him one, and fill it with the fruits of industry. In doing this, he will find no time to wait for, or complain of, luck.—Ways of Life.