Looking Over Old Clothes.
Unless you have the habit of looking over your clothes regularly and with a fair degree of frequency, you will become a scarecrow before you know it. On examining the garments you discover a little tear here, a spot there, a soiled collar, a crumpled lapel, little matters like these, easily remedied now, but not so easily remedied, some of them, if allowed to continue. Moreover, some suits are discovered to be sadly in need of cleaning and pressing. They come back from the tailors looking so nice that all your friends think you have new clothes. The wearing of neat, clean clothes is a business and social asset not to be neglected. You owe it to your own best interests to look over your old clothes.
But I am chiefly concerned here with the parallel practice applied to one's life. Regularly and somewhat often we need to look over the old clothes of the soul! Our work: is it what it should be, or have we allowed ourselves gradually to be loaded up with a lot of tasks that signify little for us or the world? Our thoughts: have we allowed a lot of fears and worries and doubts and sneers to creep into our minds, and do we need to clean them out and bring in a fresh lot of new, enlarging, and revivifying ideas? Our social life: are we becoming self-centered? or, on the other hand, are we becoming trivial? Our religious life: is it becoming humdrum and losing all its original freshness and power? This is the kind of investigation we need to make.
The result may be that we shall decide on making less money and more character: or, on some definite course of worth-while reading; or, on doing more hard work for our employers; or, on more recreation or recreation of a better sort. Some change in our lives is bound to come, from a suit cleaned and pressed to a new suit altogether and the old suit sold to the rag-man!
The Daily Balance.
In a little country store, where new goods are seldom bought, where the capital is small, the clerks are few, and all operations are simple, it is not necessary for the bookkeeper to take a daily balance. One balance a month will probably give the owner a sufficiently accurate idea of how his business is progressing. But in a large city department store, with enormous amounts of goods coming in and going out daily, with a large force of clerks and many heads of departments, with numerous possibilities of loss as well as gain, the daily balance is necessary. Each night the responsible managers must know just how the business stands, that they may plan wisely for the morrow and for the coming months.
Nor is it otherwise with the business of our living, which in even the simplest lives has more departments than any department store, with interests infinitely more extensive and important. We need imperatively to take a daily balance. Every night we must sum up our losses and our gains. If there is a leak anywhere, we must know it at once. If we are using false methods, we must immediately change them for good methods. Our spiritual bookkeeping must be honest to the least particular, and it must be up to the minute. It is the little dishonesties, the little laxnesses, the little daily failures that lead to bankruptcy in trade, and with equal sureness to bankruptcy in the great business of the soul.