I wondered what the grimy-faced man from the shaft, wearing the miner's lamp in his cap, could possibly have to do with the lyceum course. But I learned that he had all to do with it. He had sold the tickets and had done all the managing. He was superintendent of the Sunday school. He was the storm-center of every altruistic effort in the town--the greatest man there, because the most serviceable, tho he worked every day full time with his pick at his bread-and-butter job.
The great people are so busy serving that they have little time to strut and pose in the show places. Few of them are "prominent clubmen." You rarely find their names in the society page. They rarely give "brilliant social functions." Their idle families attend to such things.
A Glimpse of Gunsaulus I found a great man lecturing at the chautauquas. He preaches in Chicago on Sundays to thousands. He writes books and runs a college he founded by his own preaching. He is the mainspring of so many uplift movements that his name gets into the papers about every day, and you read it in almost every committee doing good things in Chicago.
He had broken away from Chicago to have a vacation. Many people think that a vacation means going off somewhere and stretching out under trees or letting the mind become a blank. But this Chicago preacher went from one chautauqua town to another, and took his vacation going up and down the streets. He dug into the local history of each place, and before dinner he knew more about the place than most of the natives.
"There is a sermon for me," he would exclaim every half-hour. He went to see people who were doing things. He went to see people who were doing nothing. In every town he would discover somebody of unusual attainment. He made every town an unusual town. He turned the humdrum travel map into a wonderland. He scolded lazy towns and praised enterprising ones. He stopped young fellows on the streets.
"What are you going to do in life?" Perhaps the young man would say, "I have no chance." "You come to Chicago and I'll give you a chance," the man on his vacation would reply.
So this Chicago preacher was busy every day, working overtime on his vacation. He was busy about other people's business. He did not once ask the price of land, nor where there was a good investment for himself, but every day he was trying to make an investment in somebody else.
His friends would sometimes worry about him. They would say, "Why doesn't the doctor take care of himself, instead of taking care of everybody else? He wears himself out for other people until he hasn't strength enough left to lecture and do his own work."
Sometimes they were right about that.
But he that saveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life in loving service finds it returning to him great and glorious. This man's preaching did not make him great. His college did not make him great. His books did not make him great. These are the by-products. His life of service for others makes him great--makes his preaching, his college and his books great.
This Chicago man gives his life into the service of humanity, and it becomes the fuel to make the steam to accomplish the wonderful things he does. Let him stop and "take care of himself," and his career would stop.
If he had begun life by "taking care of himself" and "looking out for number one," stipulating in advance every cent he was to get and writing it all down in the contract, most likely Dr. Frank W.
Gunsaulus would have remained a struggling, discouraged preacher in the backwoods of Morrow county, Ohio.
Give It Now Gunsaulus often says, "You are planning and saving and telling yourself that afterwhile you are going to give great things and do great things. Give it now! Give your dollar now, rather than your thousands afterwhile. You need to give it now, and the world needs to get it now."