IV
With this we have also solved the last question you will put: “What shall we get out of it? What real gain has a man from true culture?” To this is to be answered that every great inward advancement a man makes rests first upon a faith. He must forsake something he knows, and seek something toward which only a presentiment is leading him, something he can not understand yet fully, because the capacity is for the present lacking.
But if he possesses the courage to will it, he attains it; and of those who have attained this goal, not one has yet found the cost too high, or the toil too hard.
The reward of virtue in this world is just this, that virtue is, and that it can be overcome by no power of the world, but itself is the only real power and force that will completely fill life full and satisfy.
Tennyson has expressed this very beautifully in his poem “Wages”:
“Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,
Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an endless sea—
Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong—
Nay, but she aim’d not at glory, no lover of glory she:
Give her the glory of going on, and still to be.