RADIANCIES OF MORAL COURAGE
I want to radiate moral courage. Who that has read the life of Emerson
cannot appreciate the moral courage that controlled him at all times. He
was incapable of cowardice. Timid, sensitive as the most delicate plant,
shrinking from notoriety, he yet did and said things that brought down
upon him the censure and concentrated fury and hatred of thousands. He,
so gentle and kind, spoke words that hit and smashed and crashed through
the entrenched ideas of the world like red-hot cannon-balls. Though
never a politician, he spoke words on the principles involved in the
slavery question that surpassed in fervid eloquence and effective power
anything ever said by Wendell Phillips or William Lloyd Garrison. On one
occasion he faced a mob of fiery sympathizers with the other side and
declared the highest, purest truths of the brotherhood of man, and when
remonstrated with for daring such an assemblage he calmly and quietly
replied: "Had I been dumb, I would have gone and muttered and made
signs."
When men worshiped certain ideas and believed that they were religion,
and that it was needful to believe them in order to live aright on earth
and win the favor of a heavenly hereafter, Emerson arose and smote them
into the dust by the calm, relentless, passionless logic of one who sees
and knows--the divinely ordained prophet--and one result of his daring
was that he was cast out from his pulpit and from the sweet and hallowed
communion he and his grandfathers for eight past generations had enjoyed
in the church. What a wrenching of heart strings, what a tearing away of
old ties, what an isolation of oneself, what a bringing down of the
avalanche of abuse, of slander, of harsh words and unkind deeds! Yet he
never hesitated. The oversoul called to the sacrifice, and at the same
time pointed to the recompense of the spirit, and he never saw, never
knew, never felt the contumely, the scorn, the ostracism, the abuse.
Is it not glorious to live in such a realm of high spiritual courage? To
do unconsciously? To _be_ unconsciously? Not to have to work your
courage up to the daring point; to nerve yourself for the plunge, but to
plunge anyhow, trusting, knowing that in doing the highest, the noblest,
the best thing conceivable to you, you can never fail? What does
starvation of the body mean to the man whose soul is uplifted into the
presence of the Most High? Such an one can live for forty days or forty
years, if necessary, without more food than would feed a sparrow. What
does isolation from his fellows--preachers, doctors, lawyers, every-day
men and women--mean to a man who communes daily with angels, archangels,
and with God Himself? Does he feel slighted, hurt, neglected? Such a
courage as this I myself desire, so that I may live it, radiate it every
moment.
It was this courage that made John Brown march on that most quixotic of
all marches--with a handful of men to free the slave. It was rebellion,
anarchy, unlawful invasion, the breaking of man's law--of course it was.
But he saw a higher vision than man's outlook, he felt a higher call
than man's demand, and he knew no law of man in the obedience of his
soul, body, life, _his all_, to the call of the Spirit. And though a
rude Kansas pioneer and farmer, he had the soul-courage to obey.
Forward! March! He marched to his death!
Did he? No! He marched to the death of his body, but he began a
triumphant march in the heavens forever brilliantly illuminating the
minds and souls of men, and lifting them up into a higher state of life,
making them less sordid, less afraid of position, life, honor, less
easily influenced by the keen censure and scorn of the blind world.
Talk about battlefields and batteries, forts and forlorn hopes and the
courages of the Charge of the Light Brigade, or of the Stand of the Old
Guards at Waterloo, or of Dewey sailing into Manila Harbor; what were
those acts of physical courage compared with the moral heroism that
leads a man to dare the stake, the cross, or the tortures of the bigot?
Read Mark Twain's _Life of Joan of Arc_, and feel your heart throb to
the high-souled, divinely inspired courage of that girl of eighteen; not
only physical courage, as when she led, in person, the charges of the
French army against the English, who had been victorious in France for
almost a hundred years, but when she dared the great ecclesiastical
courts that badgered and baited her, as she sat unaided, alone,
unbefriended, undefended, unadvised by man, for weeks at a time, when
the cowardly hounds were determined to send her to the stake. Where did
her heroism and courage come from that she, a mere country peasant
child, who had never even ridden a horse, or seen a battlefield, who
never had read a book, or knew the first thing of guiding and
controlling soldiers, or setting an army in battle array; I say, where
did her courage come from, that she could dare to go into the proud
presence of nobles and warriors and demand that they give her a guard to
take her to the King of France, where she assured him that she would
soon drive out the English and have him duly crowned king of his
reconquered provinces? Here was the radiant life in actual, potent
exercise. She radiated courage and faith, just as the sun radiates
heat--in such abundance that men sweated with it, men were fired to the
intense heat and fervor of new life and courage with it. So that, from a
cowed, disheartened pack of whipped men, who fled from the mere sound of
approach of a small body of English soldiers, raw recruits, as well as
seasoned veterans, shouted to be led against the foe, and when once in
the conflict hammered away regardless of wounds, even of death, until
victory was theirs.
Whence came this radiant courage and power? It was simply because she
dared to listen to the voices speaking to her soul, and _nothing else
counted_. That's the life I want to get hold of. That is the courage and
the life I wish to radiate. Afraid of men, of starvation, of opposition,
of censure, of hatred, of ostracism? No! Why should we be afraid to lose
a few cents, when our hands are filled with diamonds, and rubies, and
pearls, and nuggets of gold? Why should we fear men, when we have the
courage of our convictions?
Let us look not down, but up, and seek to draw from the heavens above
the inspiration, the courage, the bravery, the heroism of the soul.
There has recently passed away in despotic Russia a man whose life for
years has radiated moral courage throughout the world. Tolstoi had the
courage of his convictions. He felt that social distinctions were
wrong. Immediately he did the practical thing--put himself on the plane
of every common laboring man by personally becoming a tiller of his own
soil. "What a fool!" exclaimed the aristocratic world to which, by
birth, he belonged. "Does he think he can change our opinions by that
silly act?" they cried. No! He knew it would have little or no effect on
them, but he was compelled to clear his own soul. So he braved their
laughter and scorn, their contumely and contempt, that the world might
know for certain what he really did think and feel.
He came to the conclusion that the Government of Russia, and the conduct
of the ministers of the Greek Church--the established church of
Russia--were neither in conformity with true religion nor true
brotherhood. Though the former was despotic, and the latter as
"hide-bound and dogmatic as rigid adherence to dead forms and creeds
ever makes men," he fearlessly expressed his inmost convictions against
both and called upon them to change, reform, amend their ways and
actually become what they professed to be. The state threatened him with
Siberian banishment unless he kept silence, but never till death
silenced him did he heed the threatening command; the church cast him
out, and then he wrote a book, _My Religion_, that gave newer and more
exalted conceptions of religion to the world, even though possibly it
would be hard to find a single man who accepts everything just as
Tolstoi set it forth in that book.
He came to the decision that the fine clothes and luxurious surroundings
of the rich and noble were neither Christian nor humane. They caused
envy and bitterness in the hearts of those whose lives were one long
struggle with poverty. So at once he cast off his gorgeous apparel,
denuded his own rooms of all unnecessary and elaborate furnishings, and
thus, again and further, placed himself where men could feel the truth
and power of his utterances about human brotherhood.
When Russia declared war against Japan, Tolstoi wrote a letter to the
Emperor, the state officials, and the Russian people that was a loud
trumpet blast heard throughout the world calling upon them in the name
of their Creator and down-trodden humanity to stop! and declare peace.
Many a man had been sent to Siberia for life--nay, sent to be speedily
tortured to death--for far less than this, but this fearless old man let
his voice ring out with a power that convinced thousands as never before
that war at its best was but a relic of barbarism and a disgrace to
every professedly progressive nation.
Oh, for a courage like Tolstoi's--true-hearted, brave, simple-minded,
pure, that never failed when called upon. Granted he was "queer,"
"quixotic," "unbalanced," "impracticable," was not his queerness and
impracticability at least on the side of the moral forces of the world?
Everybody knew where and how he stood; where his sympathies were; and
his life has strengthened the backbone and put new vigor into the weak
knees of hundreds of thousands, for moral courage radiates with power
that increases according to the square of the distance. It does not grow
less; it enlarges; for each man who feels it becomes a new generator and
transformer and thus enlarges and increases its radiating power four-,
eight-, twelve-fold.
Henry Bergh was another of these heroic moral-courage radiators. His
tender heart was cut to the quick day by day by seeing the cruelties
perpetrated upon the poor dumb brutes of the city of New York. He
determined to do what he could to stop these barbarous practices. He
agitated and wrote, spoke and interviewed until he succeeded in getting
ordinances and acts passed which gave him power to prevent whatever
cruelties he saw. How he was jeered; how he was cursed, when he sought
to interfere with a brutal driver who would cruelly whip his horses to
compel them to drag loads beyond their strength! The newspapers said he
stood in the way of business, and they sarcastically called him "the
knight of the doleful countenance," not realizing that it was the
cruelties perpetrated by so-called men upon their younger brothers--the
dumb animals--that had so frozen the pain and anguish of his heart upon
his face. But his heart never failed, his courage never wavered.
Threatened, mobbed, his life often in peril, he fearlessly waged
constant warfare against cruelty, and to-day the very city that hated
and scorned him is building monuments to his honor in every
street-watering trough they erect. And his radiant influence has reached
every civilized city _in the world_, such is the penetrating radiancy of
a loving and true heart.
Before I proceed to a further consideration of this radiancy of a
large-hearted, moral heroism, I want to answer the objection raised to
what I have already written by a young man to whom I read it. He said:
"But I am not an Emerson, or a Wendell Phillips, or a John Brown, or
Tolstoi. What chance do I have of exercising moral courage?"
A very pertinent question, and one I am glad to try to answer. I do not
believe there was ever a man, a time, or a place which did not,
sometime, somehow, call for the exercise of moral heroism. And
especially in these days of lax principle, breaking down of old
standards, political graft, and worship of material success. What
minister is there in no matter what church who is not called upon, now
and again, nay, often, to speak fearlessly upon some practical subject
upon which people are looking for light? Is he a moral hero who taboos
such subjects, who refrains from discussing them in the pulpit because
they are not "gospel" subjects? What gospel subject can surpass in
interest and in human and divine appeal to the soul of man the
"white-slave" question, and a host of other subjects upon which ordinary
well-to-do men and women need enlightenment? That minister is endowed
with the radiant power of moral courage who, even though he offend some
of the smug, comfortably righteous members of his congregation, dares to
denounce the church people who rent their houses and lands for immoral
purposes, for breweries, for saloons, for any and all things that
destroy men's bodies and souls and bring suffering to innocent women and
children. Take the child-labor question, especially in the communities
where men live who have become rich by using child labor, whether in
cotton factories, glass factories, tobacco, or any other factories.
Should not such men hear the gospel plainly and without equivocation?
Who is to give it? The minister of the Christ who came to seek and save
the down-trodden, the injured, the forsaken, the lost. Then all honor to
the man who dares to speak out, dares to be true to the inward voice,
though he lose caste, position, salary.
The same courage is required of the politician. How often the public
clamor for, or against, the very opposite of that which is right. In
California a few years ago there was a great fight for the exclusion of
the Japanese and Chinese. How about the doctrine of the brotherhood of
man? Can we play fast and loose with eternal principles? No! Let the
true politician stand by the truth and let the poltroon sacrifice his
principles for temporary advancement and gain.
There is not an employee who at some time or another is not called upon
to exercise moral courage. Some are asked to do dishonest, mean,
disreputable, contemptible things--for their employers. Some have one
temptation, some another. Stand firm for the highest truth. Be morally
brave and courageous. Dare to refuse. Dare to risk losing your job
rather than your character. Dare to be poor rather than mean.
One of the great temptations of men and women to-day is to appear better
off than they are. We are all as good as everybody else--so we say--and,
therefore, we must dress as well, dine as well, live as well, and show
off as much. What is the result in many cases? Financial worry or
disaster at best; criminality at worst. For many a man to-day is in the
penitentiary because he and his wife did not have the moral courage to
dare to live within their income; she did not dare to wear her
last-year's hat, or a made-over gown, and he did not dare say No! when
she insisted upon having new and expensive things, or would not deny
himself when his "set" indulged in an expensive pastime which he could
not afford. Oh, the pity of it! Let your courage have a chance to grow.
Plant the seeds of moral heroism early, so that when the testing time
comes you will find the tree already grown to which you can cling.
Every boy and every girl--no matter how young--has times when
temptations come which it requires moral courage to resist. Better teach
your boy the duty, pleasure, and benefit of this resistance than have
him win every other prize of excellent scholarship. Are you radiating
such courage so that your children feel it? That they are influenced by
it? Happy you, if you are, for it will return to you in the beauty,
strength, nobility, and grandeur of your boy's, your girl's, life in
after days to your benediction and joy.
The world is cold for want of moral courage. Turn on the radiator. Call
on the great source for a full supply and help make the world warm with
the heroism, the bravery, the moral courage it needs.
Possessed in any degree, however small, of this heroism of the soul, I,
myself, want to radiate the consciousness that my _natural and proper
place is in the forefront of every movement that makes for human
progress_. Most men are laggards in human progress. Of comparatively
only a few is it said in such things: "He is abreast of his times." Of
only the less than few--the solitary, the individual soldiers--is it
said: "He is ahead of his times." Here I want to find my place. These
are the men and women with whom I would stand. And I would so radiate
the spirit of advancement and progress that every awake and alert soul
and also every quiescent and sleeping soul will feel and know it when we
come in contact.
In November, 1910, there was held in the city of Chicago an anniversary
celebration of the life and work of Theodore Parker, a New England
Congregational clergyman who lived from 1810 to 1860. When professional
philosophers, reformers, and preachers were discussing, in an academic
fashion, the question of human freedom, while under our banner of
professed "human rights for all," the shackles were on the hands of four
millions of slaves, while professional statesmen were temporizing with
this iniquitous system and proposing compromises, all of which affected
slave owners, and none of them made the slave free, Theodore Parker, in
season and out of season at times appropriate and inappropriate, was a
flaming firebrand of passionate utterance against the hideous hypocrisy
of our national pretense while the rattle of these shackles was in our
ears. It was nothing to him that the solid South was against him; it was
of no weight to him that many of the "respectable moneyed men" of New
England were engaged in the slave trade, and that "practical men of
affairs" counseled moderation, toleration, and caution in dealing with
so "delicate" a subject. He saw only the horrible facts of human
slavery, and that this slavery existed in a land on whose national
banner were inscribed the words: "We believe it to be a self-evident
truth that _all men_ are created free and equal," and the only delicacy
he felt was that the national conscience should be aroused to its
hypocrisy, self-deceit, inconsistency, and dishonor, and that the
slave-holding and slave-trading business should cease in this "land of
the free and home of the brave." We, to whom the Emancipation
Proclamation has been familiar ever since its promulgation, cannot
conceive the terrible stir, the bitter antagonism, the fierce hostility
Parker's clear and ringing words caused at the time of their utterance.
In vain his fellow-preachers begged him to be more cautious, to adopt a
more conciliatory tone. Like Campanello, who took a bell for his crest,
and for his motto the words, "I will not keep silent," he quietly but
firmly, calmly but resolutely, refused, and rang out all the louder and
more insistently his call to the drugged conscience, sleeping honor, and
deadened humanities of his fellow citizens. It was he who inspired in
Lincoln that memorable phrase made forever world-famed by his glorious
Gettysburg speech: "Government of the people, by the people, for the
people." Lincoln spoke November 19, 1863. Parker had written in
November, 1846, these words:
Let the world have peace for five hundred years, the aristocracy of
blood will have gone, the aristocracy of gold will have come and
gone, that of talent will also have come and gone, and the
aristocracy of goodness, which is the democracy of man, the
government _of_ all, _for_ all, _by_ all, will be the power that is.
Democracy is direct self-government over all the people, by all the
people, for all the people.
By way of parenthesis, it is interesting here to add that in _The
Christian_ (a London, England, weekly paper), for September 17, 1910,
there was a letter giving an even earlier use of the phrase, as follows:
SIR: In your report of Principal Carpenter's striking speech at
Budapest, you cite his reference to the well-known fact that "It was
from Parker that Abraham Lincoln borrowed his famous phrase,
'Government of the people, for the people and by the people.'" But
the further fact should be remembered that Parker himself borrowed
it--doubtless through his perusal of the current _Monthly
Repository_--from Rev. Robert Aspland, our once-famous Hackney
minister. It occurs in Mr. Aspland's speech at the great Whig
banquet of 1828, which celebrated the repeal of the Test and
Corporation Acts, and at which, amongst many distinguished speakers,
Mr. Aspland, by common consent, bore away the palm of eloquence.--AN
EX-M. P.
These facts in the history of a great phrase I am glad to present, but
the most important fact is not the name of the originator, but the names
of the men who made the phrase live in the hearts of their fellows as
biting, stinging, awakening truths. Parker was one of these. Lloyd
Garrison, Wendell Phillips, John G. Whittier, Lowell, John Brown,
Lovejoy, Lincoln, were others. And you and I, friendly reader, are
to-day basking in the fuller and larger sunlight of freedom let into the
house of our common humanity by the fearless, uncompromising, daring
courage of these men.
Let us not be laggards in the army of human progress; nor content even
to be abreast with the times. Let us be athirst for deeper waters,
clearer streams. Let us get nearer the mountain top than either of these
two crowds. Let us drink of the fountain spring itself and know nothing
else but the fundamental principles of human relationship, and, drinking
of them to the full, go forth and radiate them in their original purity,
sweetness, and power, diluted only by our imperfect human expression.
Let us, in this and all similar matters, make the words of Browning
ours, that we may ringingly declare to the world as well as quietly
radiate them:
What had I on Earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel--Being--who?
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake.
Let us not merely come in for the rewards of life's conflicts in which
the few battle for the rights of the many. Let us be in the forefront of
the battle array; even if only as standard-bearers, or buglers, or
drummer boys in the forefront of the advance army, and though our hearts
are often shaken by human cowardice, let our souls triumph and keep our
faces towards the foe, courage at fighting pitch, resolution
indomitable, purpose invincible, so that, if fall we must, we shall fall
with eyes heavenward, and breast fearlessly exposed to the fire of the
enemy.
I know of no conflict now as severe as the fight for the abolition of
the slave, yet I am in the fight to help women gain the suffrage, and in
the temperance reform. I have been abused by my scientific friends as an
anti-vaccinator and anti-vivisectionist; have been threatened with a
thrashing several times for interfering with brutal teamsters and others
who were cruel to animals and children; have lost caste and position
(with a few people) because I would rebuke corporate injustice, greed,
and tyranny; I have cast behind me much money because it was offered me
in exchange for my independence and freedom. These are small things as
compared with the heroic acts of the giants of past days, but they are
the deeds my soul has been called to face. And I mention them not in
boasting, but as another "declaration of principles," principles I wish
to radiate on every hand, under all circumstances, to all people.
For I am anxious and determined that, according to the best of my
ability, I will do my share of the work of my time for the benefit of
the future. What would we be to-day without the advantages of Magna
Charta, of the Bill of Rights, of the Declaration of Independence, of
the Emancipation Proclamation? Who won these charters of our liberty?
The heroes of the past. Then the questions I constantly ask myself are:
"What are you doing to add to these liberties to hand on to future ages?
You have received freely; how are you giving? I want to help make the
future more glad and blessed, just as my present has been made glad by
the actions of the heroes of old. I have been inspired to high resolves,
heroic endeavors, blessed ambitions by what they achieved. Am I doing
anything to pass on these high inspirations to endeavor and ambition?
These men met obloquy, hatred, shame, contumely, contempt, danger,
financial loss, physical peril, and in John Brown's, Lovejoy's, and
other cases, death, because of their daring advocacy of unpopular
movements. Shall I be any the less a man than they? Shall I have
received so much, and then be craven and pass on so little?"
I believe that each generation must pay interest _in kind_ on all their
heritage of the past, or they mark the period of a nation's decline.
Unless we are better, nobler, truer, more advanced, more free, more
progressive, more generous, more philanthropic, more daring, courageous,
lion-hearted than our forefathers, we have defaulted in our interest.
And defaulters are always cowards if nothing worse. Let us not be
cowards.
In California there are strong movements against the Japanese and the
Chinese. It is easy to join the popular side, but it takes strength of
heart and courage of mind and body sometimes to stand on the other side.
I want to radiate my firm and unshakable conviction of the truth of
human brotherhood, regardless of color, nationality, prejudice, or
selfish and personal interest. Though the Japanese and Chinese, in open
and honest business competition, take away my work, even then I want to
radiate my firm belief in the _universal_ brotherhood of man. And I want
to do it without hesitation, as well as without fear. Hesitation too
often means temporizing, evasion, shuffling, and I do not want to place
myself open to any temptation to these things. Hence I would be prompt
and outspoken in my adherence and advocacy of the fundamental principles
of human brotherhood regardless of personal consequences and indifferent
alike to praise or blame.
I believe in human democracy, in human freedom, in the equality of men
and women; in morality, government, and household control; in resisting
all tyrannies, whether of law, medicine, theology, or society; in the
uplift of all the criminal and downtrodden; in the fair division of the
profits of all labor; in the jealous preservation of the independence of
every man and every woman; in the right of every child to be well born
and welcomed, and of every woman to determine, without dictation from
any one, whether she shall bear a child or not; in the abolition of all
war; in the disarmament of all nations; in the abolition of land
monopoly; in submitting every question to the test--the greatest
possible good to the greatest number. These, as I now recall them, are
the cardinal principles of my belief, my adherence to which I would
fearlessly, without hesitation or equivocation, ever and always
radiate.