The man who gives his life for a principle
has done more for his kind than he who discovers a new metal or names a
new gas, for the great motors of the race are moral, not intellectual,
and their force lies ready to the use of the poorest and weakest of us
all. We accept a truth of science so soon as it is demonstrated, are
perfectly willing to take it on authority, can appropriate whatever use
there may be in it without the least understanding of its processes, as
men send messages by the electric telegraph, but every truth of morals
must be redemonstrated in the experience of the individual man before he
is capable of utilizing it as a constituent of character or a guide in
action. A man does not receive the statements that "two and two make
four," and that "the pure in heart shall see God," on the same terms. The
one can be proved to him with four grains of corn; he can never arrive at
a belief in the other till he realize it in the intimate persuasion of
his whole being. This is typified in the mystery of the incarnation. The
divine reason must forever manifest itself anew in the lives of men, and
that as individuals. This atonement with God, this identification of the
man with the truth,[249] so that right action shall not result from the
lower reason of utility, but from the higher of a will so purified of
self as to sympathize by instinct with the eternal laws,[250] is not
something that can be done once for all, that can become historic and
traditional, a dead flower pressed between the leaves of the family
Bible, but must be renewed in every generation, and in the soul of every
man, that it may be valid.
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