"No virtue is safe," he says, "until it becomes enthusiastic. It is safe only when it becomes the home of fire. In the high realms of the spirit, it is only the passionate that is secure. The seraphim, those pure spirits who are in the immediate service of the Lord, are the 'burning ones,' and it is their noble privilege to carry fire from off the altar and touch with purifying flame the lips of the unclean."
Nothing will more certainly enkindle this life-giving flame than the study of the lives of great heroes,—first, those of sacred writ, the patriarchs, prophets and apostles, of whom the world was not worthy; then the noble army of the martyrs and the brave men of the great Middle Age; then John Wesley, John Fox, Roger Williams, Whitefield, John Knox, John Huss, John Calvin,—how ignorant our children are of the thrilling heroisms of the past!
Agnes Repplier, in one of her brilliant essays, illustrates this disgraceful fact with this anecdote:
"American children go to school six, eight or ten years, and emerge with a misunderstanding of their own country and a comprehensive ignorance of all others. They say, 'I don't know any history,' as casually as they might say, 'I don't know any chemistry.' A smiling young freshman told me recently that she had been conditioned because she knew nothing about the Reformation.
"'You mean—' I began questioningly.
"'I mean just what I say,' she interrupted. 'I didn't know what it was or where it was, or who had anything to do with it.'
"I said I didn't wonder she had come to grief. The Reformation was something of an episode. When I was a schoolgirl, I was never done studying about the Reformation. . . . We cannot leave John Wesley any more than we can leave Marlborough or Pitt out of the canvas. . . . History is philosophy teaching by example, and we are wise to admit the old historians into our counsel."
Walter Savage Landor devoted one of his most eloquent paragraphs to this subject: "Show me how great projects were executed, great advantages gained and great calamities averted. Show me the generals and the statesmen who stood foremost that I may honor them. Tell me their names that I may repeat them to my children. Show me whence laws were introduced, upon what foundation laid, by what custody guarded, in what inner keep preserved. Place History on her rightful throne."
It is true that most of the great forward steps of civilization have been made by war. Our brave soldiers of 1776, of 1812, of 1847, of 1861, and of 1898, are rightly our most revered heroes. Our children should know the stories of their lives.
But the heroes of duty should be even more emphatically impressed upon their minds. It is true that warriors are soldiers of conscience no less than others, but our children will, we hope, need chiefly the heroism of civil life, which, being less showy, requires more of resolution. Here is a tale of a soldier who kept his courage in another place than the battlefield: