[Granville-Hough] TO DO GREAT THINGS

[Trustees and Executors for Granville W. Hough]

Originally sent out 2 Jan 2009:


	TO DO GREAT THINGS

	It is not the straining for great things that is most effective: it is
the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and
better – the constant improving –that tells.  We often see young people
who seem very ambitious to get on by leaps and bounds, and are inpatient
of what they call the drudgery of their situation,  but who are doing
this drudgery in a very ordinary, slipshod way. Yet it is only by doing
the common things uncommonly well, doing them with pride and enthusiasm,
and just as well, as neatly, as quickly, and as efficiently as possible,
that you take the drudgery out of them.  This is what counts in the
final issue.  How can you expect to do a great thing well when you half
do the little things?  These are the stepping stones to the great things.

	The best way to begin to do great things is to improve the doing of the
little things as much as possible, - to put the uncommon effort into the
common task, to make it large by doing it in a great way.  Many a man
has dignified a very lowly and humble calling by bringing to it a master
spirit.  Many a great man has sat upon a cobbler’s bench, and has forged
at an anvil in a blacksmith’s shop, and has split rails for his family,
or has labored in his father’s carpentry shop.  It is the man that
dignifies the calling.  Nothing that is necessary to be done is small
when a great soul does it.

(Reflections on the life of Rev. James Lennox Sullivan and the words of
Orison Swett Marden.  Rev. James Lennox Sullivan was for many years a
leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, specializing in the
literature of Sunday Schools.  He was one of the pioneers in 
reconciliation of the Southern Baptist convention with the black 
churches and people of the South.  His church ancestry goes back to the Zion
Hill Baptist Church of Sullivan’s Hollow and its offshoot, the New
Sardis Baptist Church, all of Smith County, MS.  His physical ancestry 
goes back to the coffin maker, John Ben Sullivan, who made that lowly 
skill into a Sullivan legend by his careful attention to detail.  Our 
correspondence with Rev. Sullivan showed he was very much interested in 
our work on the Sullivan family.)

Category: Sullivan stories.