The moral elements of individual character are inevitably social.
And the social obligation immensely strengthens the sanctions which
enjoin them. When a man “has trained himself,” to use the words of
Lord Morley in dealing with Voltaire’s religion, “to look upon every
wrong in thought, every duty omitted from act, each infringement of the
inner spiritual law which humanity is constantly perfecting for its
own guidance and advantage ... as an ungrateful infection, weakening
and corrupting the future of his brothers,” he views each struggle
within his own soul against evil and each firm aspiration after purity
not as a mere incident in his own spiritual biography but as a fight
for social good and for the perfecting of the nation and of humanity.
And the struggle for social good and the perfecting of human life is
fundamentally a struggle for the triumph of ideals in personal wills.
God can take hold of men only in man. He revealed Himself and wrought
redemption less by a social process than by a personal incarnation. And
the only way of which we know to uplift the life of the nation and to
fit it for its mission and its ministry is to reform our own and other
men’s characters, and ourselves to be what manner of man among men we
would have the nation be among nations. It is of some of the elements
of character of which men stand specially in need to-day that we are to
speak in these lectures. What is good in our lives as individuals and
in our life as a nation is not in need of discussion here. And there is
no nobility in analyzing and deriding our weaknesses. Our purpose is
to urge our keeping if we have not lost them, and our regaining if we
feel them slipping from us, some of the elemental moral qualities and
spiritual resources which are vital to the capacity for duty and to the
living of a full and efficient life.
It has seemed best, on the whole, to preserve in the printed volume the
free colloquialism of the lectures as they were delivered.