Flexibility and Firmness…

“We need both flexibility and firmness in their proper place and proportion. More than this, or equally so, we need standards, conviction, strength, and self-control and the judgment to know when it is essential to be flexible, and when it is essential to be firm.

Among the most unhappy people are those with uncertain standards, those who compromise the commandments, those who are tossed and torn between “to be, or not to be.” And among the happiest people are those who have a means of measuring, a set of principles⎯who have a standard, and stick to it.

Some years ago, in speaking of the slippage of standards and stability, an eminent doctor and scholar said; “. . . This . . . makes us less than were our fathers. They had their standards and codes, and deviation from them carried immediate penalty. In our days, we have allowed ourselves to become so pliable, so flexible, so ‘relative’ to all things, in a current phrase so ‘broadminded,’ that we are in danger of having no ethic, no vision, no hope . . . Indecision locks up energy; it stabs the heart. Whereas, decision, clearly taken, brings calmness, strength, the quiet mind and a flow of power . . .

“Each good man has in himself a quiet place wherein he lives however torn seemingly by the passions of the world. That is his citadel, which must be kept inviolate against assaults. That quiet place must be founded upon a rock and the rock must be a belief, a fervent and passionate belief, in the existence of the ultimate good, and a willingness to put forth his strength against the ultimate evil . . .”

To go back to broadmindedness: It is possible to be so broadminded that everything passes through, that there is no standard or stability⎯that nothing sticks or stays. We have to give and take, but we also have to stand at times; to have standards that cannot be pushed around by pressures. As Lincoln said in the last public address of his life: “Important principles may and must be inflexible.”

Among the happiest people, among the people most at peace, are those who have standards and stay with them⎯those who seek to know what they should not do⎯and then simply do not do it.