In religious matters it is holiness which gives authority; it is love,
or the power of devotion and sacrifice, which goes to the heart, which
moves and persuades.
What all religious, poetical, pure, and tender souls are least able to
pardon is the diminution or degradation of their ideal. We must never
rouse an ideal against us; our business is to point men to another
ideal, purer, higher, more spiritual than the old, and so to raise
behind a lofty summit one more lofty still. In this way no one is
despoiled; we gain men's confidence, while at the same time forcing them
to think, and enabling those minds which are already tending toward
change to perceive new objects and goals for thought. Only that which is
replaced is destroyed, and an ideal is only replaced by satisfying the
conditions of the old with some advantages over.
Let the liberal Protestants offer us a spectacle of Christian virtue of
a holier, intenser, and more intimate kind than before; let us see it
active in their persons and in their influence, and they will have
furnished the proof demanded by the Master; the tree will be judged by
its fruits.
* * * * *
June 22, 1869 (_Nine_ A. M).--Gray and lowering weather. A fly lies dead
of cold on the page of my book, in full summer! What is life? I said to
myself, as I looked at the tiny dead creature.
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