“The bravest are the tenderest,
The loving are the daring.”
Some of the bravest and the tenderest of men have trodden knee deep in human blood. There have been wars just and inevitable; and what has been may again be. We hope not; we dream not; the Peace Palace of the Hague looms spectrally on the future horizon; we are looking that way: and at times this Peace Palace seems assertively real—ready to cope with armaments and with red-hot wrongs; but again it rises fancifully and floats evanescently away and fades on a gray sky. Is it Mirage?
The Christian Knight.
Next in moral excellence to the Christian martyr is undoubtedly the Christian knight.
Chivalry—fair flower of Feudalism, night blooming cereus wide opening in white splendor exuding fragrance in somber mediæval midnight! King Arthur and his Table Round; knights errant done to death by Don Quixote and yet victors even over the smile; Chevalier Bayard, the knight without fear and without reproach; Richard Cœur de Lion, the Black Prince, Lohengren, Parsifal, Siegfried, Don John of Austria—are flowerets of that Flower caught wax-white in amber and fixed fadelessly.
In all the sweep of history from Egypt to the hour, there is nothing nobler than the ideal Christian knight. To stand in awe of the omnipotent God; to go about the world redressing human wrongs; to love with young-world love bashfully reverent, constrained to win the world and lay it humbly at her feet; to reverence truth and to scorn with scorn unutterable all the thousand and one manifestations of the lie; to be loyal to king and country and God; to be gentle, courteous, kind to all life from highest to lowest; to stand face-front to the oncoming forces of evil and in that fight grimly to conquer or die: there is nothing nobler.
And yet not for all the glory of Don John, ideal Christian knight and hero of Lepanto, would I have one little stain of human blood on my white hands.
“New occasions teach new duties;
Time makes ancient good uncouth.”—Lowell.