All this Tone taught, not in the dull pages of a treatise, but in the
living phrases that dropped from him in his conversation, in his
correspondence, in his diaries, in his impassioned pleas for his nation
to the Executive Directory of France. Some of the greatest teachers have
been literary men only incidentally; but their teaching has none the
less the splendour of great literary utterance. The masters of
literature do not always label themselves. When a great soul utters a
great truth have we not always great literature? That is why the true
gospels of the world are always true literature. Those who have preached
the divine worth of faith and justice and charity and freedom have done
so in glorious and imperishable words: and the reason is that God speaks
through them.
That God spoke to Ireland through Tone and through those who, after
Tone, have taken up his testimony, that Tone’s teaching and theirs is
true and great and that no other teaching as to Ireland has any truth or
worthiness at all, is a thing upon which I stake all my mortal and all
my immortal hopes. And I ask the men and women of my generation to stake
their mortal and immortal hopes with me.
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