The Law of Work…

Concerning work, Mark Twain gave this short incisive sentence: “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”

“The willfully idle man… has no place in a sane, healthy and vigorous community,” said Theodore Roosevelt. “The happiest man is he who has toiled hard and successfully in his life work. The work may be done in a thousand different ways; with the brain or the hands, in the study, the field or the workshop; if it is honest work, honestly done and well worth doing, that is all we have a right to ask. Every father and mother… if they are wise, will bring up their children not to shirk difficulties, but to meet and overcome them…. Acknowledgment that the law of work is the fundamental law of our being, will help us… in facing the problems that confront us….”

There is no hard line of separation between the spiritual, the mental, and the material. The law God gave to Adam: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread…” was not merely for physical sustenance, but also a law for the salvation of the soul. We cannot save a man or lead him to his highest happiness without balance, without saving all sides of him, without his earnestly, constructively, righteously, happily contributing what he is and what he can do to what needs to be done.

Let Phillips Brooks summarize the subject: “Seek your life’s nourishment in your life’s work,” he said. “Do not let your occupation pass you by, and only leave you the basest and poorest of its benefits, the money with which it fills your purse. Compel it to give up to you the charity and faith and character and godliness which it has at its heart….”

“Everything keeps its best nature only by being put to its best use…. The best way to make a thing fit for the use for which it was first made is to put it to that use…. The best way to make the sluggish mind capable of thinking is to think with it.” The best way to balance life and enjoy its fullest benefits is to learn to love work.