He who has the clearest and intensest vision of what is at issue in the
great battle of life, and who quits himself in it most manfully, will
be the first to acknowledge that for him there has been no approach to
victory except by the faithful doing day by day of the work which lay
at his own threshold.
On the other hand, the universal experience of mankind—the dreary
confession of those who have merely sought a “low thing,” and “gone on
adding one to one;” making that the aim and object of their lives—unite
in warning us that on these lines no true victory can be had, either
for the man himself or for the cause he was sent into the world to
maintain.
No, there is no victory possible without humility and magnanimity; and
no humility or magnanimity possible without an ideal. Now there is not
one amongst us all who has not heard the call in his own heart to put
aside all evil habits, and to live a brave, simple, truthful life. It
is no modern, no Christian experience, this. The choice of Hercules,
and numberless other Pagan stories, the witness of nearly all histories
and all literatures, attest that it is an experience common to all our
race. It is of it that the poet is thinking in those fine lines of
Emerson which are written up in the Hall of Marlborough College:
“So close is glory to our dust,
So near is God to man—
When duty whispers low, ‘thou must,’
The youth replies, ‘I can.’”
It is this whisper, this call, which is the ground of what I have,
for want of a better name, been speaking of as idealism. Just in so
far as one listens to and welcomes it he is becoming an idealist—one
who is rising out of himself, and into direct contact and communion
with spiritual influences, which even when he shrinks from them, and
tries to put them aside, he feels and knows to be as real—to be more
real than all influences coming to him from the outside world—one who
is bent on bringing himself and the world into obedience to these
spiritual influences. If he turns to meet the call and answers ever so
feebly and hesitatingly, it becomes clearer and stronger. He will feel
next, that just in so far as he is becoming loyal to it he is becoming
loyal to his brethren: that he must not only build his own life up in
conformity with its teaching, must not only find or cut his own way
straight to what is fair and true and noble, but must help on those who
are around him and will come after him, and make the path easier and
plainer for them also.
I have indicated in outline, in a few sentences, a process which
takes a life-time to work out. You all know too, alas! even those who
have already listened most earnestly to the voice, and followed most
faithfully, how many influences there are about you and within you
which stand across the first steps in the path, and bar your progress;
which are forever dwarfing and distorting the ideal you are painfully
struggling after, and appealing to the cowardice and laziness and
impurity which are in every one of us, to thwart obedience to the call.
But here, as elsewhere, it is the first step which costs, and tells.
He who has once taken that, consciously and resolutely, has gained a
vantage-ground for all his life.