But it is not so much by eminent examples of young statesmen as it is by the general influence of young men in resisting the corrupting tendencies of politics, that their influence in the social state is to be measured. They oppose the tendency of political life to deprave political character, to make it cold, false, selfish, distrustful, abandoned to the greed of power and the greed of gain. They interfere with the projects of those venerable politicians who are continually appealing to the public to surrender, bit by bit, its humanity, its morality, its Christianity, for what are ludicrously misnamed practical advantages, and who slowly sap the moral vitality of a people through an insinuating appeal to their temporary interests. The heart of a nation may be eaten out by this process, without its losing any external signs of prosperity and strength; but the process itself is resisted, and the nation kept alive and impelled forward, by the purifying, though disturbing forces, which come from the generous sentiments and fervid aspirations of youth. Wise old heads may sneer as much as they please at the idea of heart in politics; but if history teaches anything, it teaches that human progress is possible only because the benevolent instincts of the heart are permanent, while the reasonings of the head are shifting. "When God," says Montesquieu, "endowed human beings with brains, he did not intend to guaranty them." And the sarcasm of the French philosopher is fully justified, when we reflect that nothing mean, base, or cruel has ever been done in this world, which has not been supported by arguments. To the mere head every historical event, whether it be infamous or glorious, is like the case at law which attracted the attention of the Irish barrister. "It was," he said, "a very pretty case, and he should like a fee of a hundred pounds to argue it either way." Who is there, indeed, who has not heard the most atrocious measures recommended by the most convincing arguments? Why, the persecutions of the early Christians, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, the Spanish Inquisition, the Reign of Terror, the institution of Slavery, the coup d' état of Louis Napoleon, are under the condemnation of history from no lack of arguments in their favor which it might puzzle a plain man to answer. But opinion in such matters is not determined by arguments, but by instincts. God, in his wrath, has not left this world to the mercy of the subtlest dialectician; and all arguments are happily transitory in their effect, when they contradict the primal intuitions of conscience and the inborn sentiments of the heart. And if wicked institutions, laboriously organized by dominant tyranny and priestcraft, and strong with the might, not merely of bad passions, but of perverted learning and prostituted logic,—if these have been swept away in the world's advancing movement, it has been by the gradual triumph of indestructible sentiments of freedom and humanity, kept fresh and bright in the souls of the young.
And in the baptism of fire and blood through which our politics are passing to their purification, who can fitly estimate our indebtedness to the young men who are now making American history the history of so much ardent patriotism and heroic achievement? When the civilization of the country prepared to engage in a death-grapple with its barbarism,—when the most beneficent of all governments was threatened by the basest of all conspiracies, the most infamous of all treasons, the most thievish of all rebellions,—and when that government was sustained by the most glorious uprising that ever surged up from the heart of a great people to defend the cause of liberty and honesty and law,—did not the hot tide of that universal patriotism sparkle and seethe and glow with special intensity in the breasts of our young men? Did you ever hear from them that contented ignominy was Christian peace? Did not meanness, falsehood, fraud, tyranny, treason, find in them, not apologetic critics, but terrible and full-armed foes? Transient defeat,—what did it but add new fiery stimulants to energies bent on an ultimate triumph? To hint to them that Davis would succeed was not only recreancy to freedom, but blasphemy against God. Better, to their impassioned patriotism, that their blood should be poured forth in an unstinted stream,—better that they, and all of us, should be pushed into that ocean whose astonished waves first felt the keel of the Mayflower, as she bore her precious freight to Plymouth Rock,—than that America should consent to be under the insolent domination of a perjured horde of slave-holders and liberticides. But that consent should never be given, and that consent could never be extorted. Minds, like theirs, which had been nurtured on the principles of constitutional freedom,—hearts, like theirs, which had caught inspiration from the heroes and martyrs of liberty,—good right arms, like theirs, which wielded the implements of war as readily as the implements of labor, all scouted the very thought of such unutterable abasement. By the patriotism which abhors treason, by the fortitude which endures privation, by the intrepidity which faces death, they proved themselves worthy of the great continent they inhabit by showing themselves capable of upholding the principles it represents.
In passing from the sphere of politics to the serener region of literature, art, science, and philosophy, there is an increasing difficulty in estimating youth by years and an increasing necessity to estimate it by qualities. One thing, however, is certain,—that the invention of new methods, the discovery of new truth, and the creation of new beauty,—intellectual acts which are among the most-important of historical events,—all belong to that thoroughly live condition of mind which we have called young. In this sense of youth, it may be said that Raphael, the greatest painter of moral beauty, and Titian, the greatest painter of sensuous beauty, were both almost equally young, though Raphael died at thirty-seven, while Titian was prematurely cut off by the plague when he was only a hundred. These, of course, are the extreme cases. But, it maybe asked, were not the greatest poems of the world, the "Iliad" of Homer, the "Divina Commedia" of Dante, the "Paradise Lost" of Milton, the creations of comparative old age? The answer to this question is, that each was probably organized round a youthful conception, and all were coextensive with the whole growth and development of their creators. Thus, we do not call Milton old when he produced "Paradise Lost," but when this mental growth was arrested; and accordingly "Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes," works produced after his prime, are comparatively bleak and bare products of a withering imagination and a shrunken personality.
But, confining the matter to the mere question of years, it may be said, that, allowing for some individual exceptions, the whole history of the human intellect will bear out the general assertion, that the power in which great natures culminate, and which fixes fatal limits to their loftiest aspirations, namely, that flashing conceptive and combining genius which fuses force and insight in one executive intelligence, which seizes salient points and central ideas, which darts in an instant along the whole line of analogies and relations, which leaps with joyous daring the vast mental spaces that separate huddled facts from harmonizing laws,—that this power, to say the least, rarely grows after thirty-five or forty. The mental stature is then reached, though it may not dwindle and be dwarfed until long afterwards. Thus, Shakspeare completed "Hamlet" when he was about thirty-six. Mozart, the Shakspeare of composers, died at thirty-six. But why enumerate? Amid the scores of instances which must crowd into every mind, let us select five men, of especial historic significance, and who are commonly imaged to our minds with heads silvered over with age,—let us take Goethe in poetry, Newton in science, Bacon in philosophy, Columbus in discovery, Watt in mechanics. Now, how stand the facts? The greatest works of Goethe were conceived and partly executed when he was a young man; and if age found him more widely and worldly wise, it found him weak in creative passion, and, as a poet, living on the interest of his youthful conceptions. Newton, in whose fertile and capacious intellect the dim, nebulous elements of truth were condensed by patient thinking into the completed star, discovered the most universal of all natural laws, the law of gravitation, before he was twenty-five, though an error of observation, not his own, prevented him from demonstrating it until he was forty. Bacon had "vast contemplative ends," and had taken "all knowledge for his province," had deeply meditated new methods and audaciously doubted old ones, before the incipient beard had begun timidly to peep from his youthful chin. The great conception of Columbus sprang from the thoughts and studies of his youth; and it was the radiance shed from this conception which gave him fortitude to bear the slow martyrdom of poverty, contempt, and sickness of heart, which embittered the toiling years preceding its late realization. The steam-engine was invented by James Watt before he was thirty; but then Watt was a thinker from his cradle. Everybody will recollect his grandmother's reproof of what she called his idleness, at the time his boyish brain was busy with meditations destined to ripen in the most marvellous and revolutionizing of all industrial inventions,—an invention which, of itself alone, has given Great Britain an additional productive power equal to ten millions of workmen, at the cost of only a halfpenny a day,—an invention which supplies the motive power by which a single county in England is enabled to produce fabrics representing the labor of twenty-one millions of men,—an invention which, combined with others, annually, in England, weaves into cloth a length of cotton thread equal to fifty-one times the distance between the earth and the sun, five thousand millions of miles,—an invention which created the wealth by which England was enabled to fight or subsidize the whole continent of Europe from 1793 to 1815, and which made that long war really a contest between the despotic power of Napoleon Bonaparte and the productive genius of James Watt. All this vast and teeming future was hidden from the good grandmother, as she saw the boy idling over the teakettle. "James," she said, "I never saw such an idle young fellow as you are. Do take a book and employ yourself usefully. For the last half-hour you have not spoken a single word. Do you know what you have been doing all this time? Why, you have taken off, and replaced, and taken off again, the tea-pot lid, and you have held alternately in the steam, first a saucer and then a spoon; and you have busied yourself in examining and collecting together the little drops formed by the condensation of the steam on the surface of the china and the silver. Now are you not ashamed to waste your time in this disgraceful manner?" Was ever idleness so productive before?
If we turn from intellectual powers to sentiments, which are the soul of powers, we shall find renewed proofs that the spirit which animates the kingdoms of mind is the youthful spirit of health and hope and energy and cheer. In the regretful tenderness with which all great thinkers have looked back upon their youth do not we detect the source of their most kindling inspirations? Time may have impaired their energies, clipped their aspirations, deadened their faith; but there, away off in the past, is the gladdening vision of their youthful years; there the joyous tumult of impulses and aims; there the grand and generous affections; there the sweet surprise of swift-springing thoughts from never-failing fountains; there the pure love of truth and beauty which sent their minds speeding out beyond the limits of positive knowledge; and there the thrills of ecstasy as new worlds opened on their view. What, to them, is the assured possession of fame, compared with that direct perception of truth and that immediate consciousness of power?
But the question arises, Cannot this youth be preserved, or, at least, perpetually renewed? We have seen, in this rapid glance at history, that it is preserved as long as the mind retains its hold on the life of things; and we have seen, both in men of action and in men of meditation, this hold weakened by age. But would it be weakened, if the loftiest meditation issued in deeds instead of thoughts? Would youth depart, if the will acted on the same high level that the mind conceived? This, also, is a question which has been historically answered. It has been answered by heroes, reformers, saints, and martyrs,—by men who have demonstrated, that, the higher the life, the more distant the approaches of age,—by men whose souls on earth have glanced into that region of spiritual ideas and spiritual persons where youth is perpetual, where ecstasy is no transient mood, but a permanent condition, and where dwell the awful forces which radiate immortal life into the will. In these men, contemplation, refusing to abide in the act by which it mounts above the world, reacts with tenfold force on the world. Using human ends simply as divine means, they wield war, statesmanship, literature, art, science, and philosophy with almost superhuman energy in the service of supernatural ideas; and history gleams with an imperfect passage, through human agents, of the life of God into the life of man. The subject is too vast, the agents too various and numerous, to be more than hinted here; and in the limitation of our theme, not only to the young in years, but to the male in sex, we are precluded from celebrating one who stands in history as perhaps the loveliest human embodiment of all that is more winning and inspiring in youth,—one whose celestial elevation of sentiment, ecstatic ardor of imagination, and power at once to melt the heart and amaze the understanding, will forever associate the saintliest heroic genius with the name of Joan of Arc. But among the crowd of great men in this exalted sphere of influence, let us select one who was the head and heart of the most memorable movement of modern times,—the German peasant, Martin Luther. With a nature originally rougher, more earth-born, and of less genial goodness than that of Joan of Arc, but with a shaping imagination of the same realizing intensity, the beautiful myths of Romish superstition, which her innocent soul transfigured into gracious ministering spirits of seraphic might and seraphic tenderness, glared in upon his more morbid spiritual vision as menacing angels, or grinning imps, or scoffing fiends. But still the tortured soul toiled sturdily on through the anguish of its self-created hells, the mind crazed and shattered, the heart hungry for peace, the will resolute that it should have no peace until it found peace in truth. Yet, our of this prodigious mental and moral anarchy, with its devil's dance of dogmas and delusions, the young Luther organized, before he was thirty, the broadest, raciest, and strongest character that ever put on the armor and hurled the bolts of the Church Militant. Casting doubt and fear under his feet, and growing more practically efficient as he grew more morally exalted, at the age of thirty-seven he had hooted out of Germany the knavish agent of a deistical Pope,—had nailed to the Wittenberg Church his intellectual defiance of the theory of Indulgences,—had cast the excommunication and decretals of the Pontiff into the flames,—and, before the principalities and power of the Empire, one German against all Germany, had simply and sublimely indicated the identity of his doctrine with his nature, by declaring that he not merely would not, but could not, recant.
And whom could he not abjure? Does not this question point to Him who is the central Person and Power of the past eighteen hundred years of history?—to Him who will be the central Person and Power of the whole future of history?—to Him who came into the world in the form of a young man, and whom a young man announced, crying in the wilderness?—to Him who clasps in his thought and in his love the whole humanity whose troubled annals history recounts, and who divinized the spirit of youth when He assumed its form?