(How many crises can we have at once? It seems as if the Four Horsemen are galloping through our land—Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death. The economy has driven thousands to our food banks. A pandemic continues to spread in our world. There is disorder, death, and destruction in our streets. The headlines of yesterday’s crisis are pushed aside by the one of today. Dr. Frank Crane wrote of how each of us might deal with crisis in the January, 1920 issue of Hearst’s: A Magazine with a Mission. In a time of crisis, he said, it is Principles that will be to us—-)
AS ANCHOR TO THE SHIP
It is not what you can do ordinarily, but what you can do in a crisis, that counts. The crisis is the swift fire that tries men, as gold is tried, revealing the fine metal and the dross. You never know what is in a soul until you see it pass through a supreme moment.
That unmasks the hero, uncovers the god. He may have seemed a tramp, a shiftless loafer, a ne’er-do-well, but when the factory takes fire and all are paralyzed with fear, it is he that plunges into the burning building and rescues the boy at the cost of his own life.
She may have been a most drab and commonplace woman, ignorant and low, but when her hour strikes she moves towards it with the majesty of a queen, and cares for those stricken with the pest in fine carelessness for her own life.
The question is, what will you do in a pinch? Will you measure up? Or will you muff?
The fierce rays of responsibility all focused into one white hot moment have a curious effect on souls. One person will be melted to panic. Another will be steeled to unusual strength.
The merciless searchlight of danger moves over the city, lighting upon this one and that.
How will you act when it rests upon you?
What reserves of power have you? What hidden store of resources? Your final efficiency will depend upon this.
Does danger, responsibility, the sense of the fatefulness of the moment, key you up, cheer your brain to think quickly and accurately, and steady your hand to its highest skill?
All your life you are preparing for the crisis. When it comes you will see your naked soul as it is—clean and strong, or cringing and deformed. It is your Day of Judgment.
When it comes, a lot of things will not matter: your money, for one thing, and your station in life, for another. All that will matter will be, whether you are a man or a mouse.
In the crisis you suddenly become aware of the vital importance of principles. For it is these, the great, deep, subconscious convictions, the sleepers under the house of life, that decide whether you are to stand the storm or be swept away.
Your opinions may be upset, your power to think may be unloosed; but if your principles hold, you shall not fall.
Principles are to the soul what the great tap-root is to the tree, what the anchor and the cable arc to the ship, what the gold reserve is to the bank. Have you any?
Are there some things you believe in and will risk your life upon, things that lie too firmly imbedded in you for argument, too fundamental even to be taken up and examined?
Policy and cleverness, alertness and shiftiness arc very useful in everyday weather, but the man that has these only, and no fixed principles, “shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand; and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and smote upon that house.
“And it fell! And great was the fall thereof.”