In moral self-culture great benefit is derived from example, whether of the living or the dead. Perhaps the dead are, in this respect, more useful than the living. In witnessing the worthy deeds and beneficent agency of a person of superior excellence, the tendency is to an over-exact imitation of specific acts and methods, which, precisely because they are spontaneous and fitting in his case, will not be so in the case of his copyist; while the biography of an eminently good man enlists our sympathy with his spirit rather than with the details of his life, and stimulates us to embody the same spirit in widely different forms of duty and usefulness. Thus the school-master who in Dr. Arnold's lifetime heard of his unprecedented success as an educator, would have been tempted to go to Rugby, to study the system on the ground, and then to adopt, so far as possible, the very plans which he there saw in successful operation,—plans which might have been fitted neither to his genius, the traditions of his school, nor the demands of its patrons. At the same time, the interior of Rugby School was very little known, the principles of its administration still less, to persons other than teachers. But Arnold's biography, revealing the foundation-principles of his character and his work, raised up for him a host of imitators of all classes and conditions. Price, who converted his immense candle-factory near London into a veritable Christian seminary for mutual improvement in knowledge, virtue, and piety, professed to owe his impulse to this [pg 112] enterprise solely to the “Life of Arnold,” and like instances were multiplied in very various professions throughout the English-speaking world. In fine, example is of service to us, not in pointing out the precise things to be done, but in exhibiting the beauty, loveliness, and majesty of moral goodness, the possibility of exalted moral attainments, and the varied scope for their exercise in human life. Even he whose example we, as Christians, hold in a reverence which none other shares, is to be imitated, not by slavishly copying his specific acts, which, because they were suitable in Judæa in the first century, are for the most part unfitting in America in the nineteenth century, but by imbibing his spirit, and then incarnating it in the forms of active duty and service appropriate to our time and land.
Finally, and obviously, the practice of virtue is the most efficient means of moral self-culture. As the thought uttered or written becomes indelibly fixed in the mind, so does the principle or sentiment embodied in action become more intimately and persistently an element of the moral self-consciousness.
Chapter X.
Justice; Or, Duties To One's Fellow-Beings.
Justice, in the common use of the word, refers only to such rights and dues as can be precisely defined, enacted by law, and enforced by legal authority. Yet we virtually recognize a broader meaning of the word, whenever we place law and justice in opposition to each other, as when we speak of an unjust law. In this phrase we imply that there is a supreme and universal justice, of whose requirements human law is but a partial and imperfect transcript. This justice must embrace all rights and dues of all beings, human and Divine; and it is in this sense that we may regard whatever any one being in the universe can fitly claim of another being as coming under the head of justice. Such, as we have already intimated, is the sense in which we have used the term in the caption of a chapter which will embrace piety and benevolence no less than integrity and veracity.