This is a wonderful speech given by Paul Harvey on hard work. It will challenge us as American’s to return to work and but our sweat and blood into our jobs so we continue to build a strong America.
Transcript
America’s preachers tell me that there is no sermon which is looked forward to with less enthusiasm than a sermon about sin. Well, that’s probably true. If we’re talking about a secular sermon on the subject of hard work. There is no gospel less popular than the gospel of hard work. I can ask you today, I could ask you right now to demonstrate your faith in America by handing you poisonous snakes and many or most of you would. I could outline a fundamental Christian code of conduct which strictly forbids the use of stimulants or sedatives or the wearing of jewelry and many would, willingly and without question, accept and be bound by such abstinence. Our leaders could readily rally you to fight and die for your country as they had many times and, and you would, even again. But if Paul Harvey or any politician should state that our only chance for survival is to get off our dead centers and get to work, well, I’d be lucky if you let me finish. But I’m going to test my luck today. You see I don’t happen to be running for or from anything and it does make a difference.
The pregnant skyline of America was set in place one brick at a time. Now that represents a lot of calluses. America the beautiful is not an accomplished fact guaranteed to remain intact. God shed His grace on thee, to be sure. This was wasteland when God had it to Himself. He handed man a hoe and said you want another Eden, all right earn it. And all that is necessary for the weeds to take over again is for you and me to lay down that hoe. Now Americans, the problem is less acute today than it has been. We’re on the right track right now, but if we sit down on that track I’m afraid we’re going to get run over. We tell our young people how our country was carved out of the wilderness. No it wasn’t. Our nation was not carved out of the wilderness. Our nation was hammered and hoed and chopped and dug and sawed and clawed out of the wilderness by bare-handed man who asked nothing for nothing.
America did not start out with an agricultural production that’s the awe and envy of the world. it was seeded first by sodbusting farmers who fought Indians and ranchers and cold and heat and drought and bugs and flood and one another. The fruited plain sprang forth from barren acres only after they had been watered with a lot of sweat. I guess what I’m saying is that the more history I study, ours and others, the more certain I am that there is one fertilizer essential to the survival of civilization, and that fertilizer is sweat. And I don’t mean perspiration, I mean the kind of steamy, streamy, salty sweat that’s run from a man by hard physical work. Somehow the sweat gets into the soil of a farm, or a factory, or a city, or a state, or a nation, and everything there a bouts grows tall and strong and tough enough to stand against any storm. But the day the sweat dries up, the soil dries up, and whole civilizations are buried in dust.
