THE IDEAL IS THE SOURCE OF ENTHUSIASM

1. How many young men have I not hailed at the commencement of their career, glowing with enthusiasm and full of the poetry of great enterprises,

MORAL CYNICISM

2. Whom I see to-day precocious old men, with the wrinkles of cold calculation on their brow; calling themselves free from illusion, when they are only disheartened; and practical, when they are only commonplace!

3. Moral enthusiasm makes many a mischievous mistake in its haste and blindness, and greatly needs the guidance of wiser thought;

4. But this tone of moral scepticism, which disparages the very springs of generous labour, and treats them as follies laughed at by the cynicism of nature, is a thousand-fold more desolating.

5. For it carries poison to the very roots of good. It soaks through the prolific soil of all the virtues, and turns the promise of Eden into a Dead Sea shore.

6. To lose the sense of an ideal right, to yield it up before a show of might,—that is the only infidelity, the only atheism we need have any fear of.

7. Then, indeed, a fairer world than that we see about us-the world of moral truth and moral beauty-would

be shattered and broken, and in the ruins it were hardly worth while to live.

THE IDEAL

IS THE

8. Man is not changed by whitewashing or gilding his habitation; a people cannot be regenerated by teaching them the worship of enjoyment; they cannot be taught a spirit of sacrifice by speaking to them of material rewards.

BREATH OF
LIFE

9. It is the soul which creates to itself a body; the idea which makes to itself a habitation.

10. One great thought breathed into a man may regenerate him. The idea of Freedom in ancient and modern republics, the idea of Inspiration in various religious sects, how have these triumphed over worldly interests!

11. How many heroes and martyrs have they formed! Great ideas are mightier than the passions.

12. The animating spring of all improvement, in individuals and in societies, is not their knowledge of the actual but their conception of the possible.

13. To the personal conscience there is ever present a higher than it has reached, a light beyond, which throws a perpetual shadow on the track behind.

14. And if the social reformer who takes his vow against some public sin, successfully defies the cold cautions of experience, it is because the vision of a purified future steadies his eye and nerves his arm.

15. But for this irrepressible idea, sleeping or waking at the heart of our humanity, we should have no standard by which to try the present and measure its deformities and sins;

16. And until it emerges from an idea into a faith, till

it stands with us not for a prismatic semblance but for the only real, it will lay no powerful hold upon the springs of the Will, inspire no sacrifice, dare no conflict.

17. Man does not live by bread alone, but by faith, by admiration, by sympathy.

18. The vision of the ideal guards monotony of work from becoming monotony of life.

CHAPTER LXXI

OUR FINEST HOPE IS FINEST MEMORY

1. The soul of man is widening toward the Past; He spells the record of his long descent, More largely conscious of the life that was.

THE LIVING
PAST

2. The faith that life on earth is being shaped
To glorious ends, that order, justice, love,
Mean man's completeness, mean effect as sure
As roundness in the dew-drop-that great faith
Is but the rushing and expanding stream
Of thought, of feeling, fed by all the past.

3. Cold graves, we say? It shall be testified
That living men who burn in heart and brain,
Without the dead were colder. If we tried

To sink the past beneath our feet, be sure
The future would not stand.

4. There is no other genuine enthusiasm for humanity than one which has travelled the common highway of reason, the life of the good neighbour and the honest citizen.

5. Century by century the educating process of the social life has been working at human nature; it has built itself into our inmost soul.

6. The spring of virtuous action is the social instinct, which is set to work by the practice of comradeship.

7. The union of men in a common effort for

THE VOICE OF MAN

a common object, this is and always has been the true school of character.

8. Conscience, the sense of right and wrong, springs out of the habit of judging things from the point of view of all and not of one.

9. It is Ourself, not ourselves, that makes for righte

ousness.

10. Conscience is the voice of Man, ingrained into our hearts, commanding us to work for man.

11. The voice of Conscience is the voice of our Father Man who is within us; the accumulated instinct of the race is poured into each one of us, and overflows us, as if the ocean were poured into a cup.