WENDELL PHILLIPS
May the good Lord ever keep me from wishing to say the last word; and also from assigning ranks or awarding prizes to great men gone. However, it is a joy to get acquainted with a noble, splendid personality, and then introduce him to you, or at least draw the arras, so you can see him as he lived and worked or nobly failed.
And if you and I understand this man it is because we are much akin to him. The only relationship, after all, is the spiritual relationship. Your brother after the flesh may not be your brother at all; you may live in different worlds and call to each other in strange tongues across wide seas of misunderstandings. "Who is my mother and who are my brethren?"
As you understand a man, just in that degree are you related to him. There is a great joy in discovering kinship—for in that moment you discover yourself, and life consists in getting acquainted with yourself. We see ourselves mirrored in the soul of another—that is what love is, or pretty nearly so.
If you like what I write, it is because I express for you the things you already know; we are akin, our heads are in the same stratum—we are breathing the same atmosphere. To the degree that you comprehend the character of Wendell Phillips you are akin to him. I once thought great men were all ten feet high, but since I have met a few, both in astral form and in the flesh, I have found out differently.
What kind of a man was Wendell Phillips?
Very much like you and me, Blessed, very much like you and me.
I think well of great people, I think well of myself, and I think well of you. We are all God's children—all parts of the Whole—akin to Divinity.
Phillips never thought he was doing much—never took any great pride in past performances. When what you have done in the past looks large to you, you have not done much today. His hopes were so high that there crept into his life a tinge of disappointment—some have called it bitterness, but that is not the word—just a touch of sadness because he was unable to do more. This was a matter of temperament, perhaps, but it reveals the humanity as well as the divinity of the man. There is nothing worse than self-complacency—smugosity is sin.