RADIANCIES OF MORAL COURAGE

I want to radiate moral courage. Who that has read the life of Emerson cannot appreciate the moral courage that controlled him at all times. He was incapable of cowardice. Timid, sensitive as the most delicate plant, shrinking from notoriety, he yet did and said things that brought down upon him the censure and concentrated fury and hatred of thousands. He, so gentle and kind, spoke words that hit and smashed and crashed through the entrenched ideas of the world like red-hot cannon-balls. Though never a politician, he spoke words on the principles involved in the slavery question that surpassed in fervid eloquence and effective power anything ever said by Wendell Phillips or William Lloyd Garrison. On one occasion he faced a mob of fiery sympathizers with the other side and declared the highest, purest truths of the brotherhood of man, and when remonstrated with for daring such an assemblage he calmly and quietly replied: "Had I been dumb, I would have gone and muttered and made signs."

When men worshiped certain ideas and believed that they were religion, and that it was needful to believe them in order to live aright on earth and win the favor of a heavenly hereafter, Emerson arose and smote them into the dust by the calm, relentless, passionless logic of one who sees and knows—the divinely ordained prophet—and one result of his daring was that he was cast out from his pulpit and from the sweet and hallowed communion he and his grandfathers for eight past generations had enjoyed in the church. What a wrenching of heart strings, what a tearing away of old ties, what an isolation of oneself, what a bringing down of the avalanche of abuse, of slander, of harsh words and unkind deeds! Yet he never hesitated. The oversoul called to the sacrifice, and at the same time pointed to the recompense of the spirit, and he never saw, never knew, never felt the contumely, the scorn, the ostracism, the abuse.

Is it not glorious to live in such a realm of high spiritual courage? To do unconsciously? To be unconsciously? Not to have to work your courage up to the daring point; to nerve yourself for the plunge, but to plunge anyhow, trusting, knowing that in doing the highest, the noblest, the best thing conceivable to you, you can never fail? What does starvation of the body mean to the man whose soul is uplifted into the presence of the Most High? Such an one can live for forty days or forty years, if necessary, without more food than would feed a sparrow. What does isolation from his fellows—preachers, doctors, lawyers, every-day men and women—mean to a man who communes daily with angels, archangels, and with God Himself? Does he feel slighted, hurt, neglected? Such a courage as this I myself desire, so that I may live it, radiate it every moment.

It was this courage that made John Brown march on that most quixotic of all marches—with a handful of men to free the slave. It was rebellion, anarchy, unlawful invasion, the breaking of man's law—of course it was. But he saw a higher vision than man's outlook, he felt a higher call than man's demand, and he knew no law of man in the obedience of his soul, body, life, his all, to the call of the Spirit. And though a rude Kansas pioneer and farmer, he had the soul-courage to obey. Forward! March! He marched to his death!

Did he? No! He marched to the death of his body, but he began a triumphant march in the heavens forever brilliantly illuminating the minds and souls of men, and lifting them up into a higher state of life, making them less sordid, less afraid of position, life, honor, less easily influenced by the keen censure and scorn of the blind world.

Talk about battlefields and batteries, forts and forlorn hopes and the courages of the Charge of the Light Brigade, or of the Stand of the Old Guards at Waterloo, or of Dewey sailing into Manila Harbor; what were those acts of physical courage compared with the moral heroism that leads a man to dare the stake, the cross, or the tortures of the bigot? Read Mark Twain's Life of Joan of Arc, and feel your heart throb to the high-souled, divinely inspired courage of that girl of eighteen; not only physical courage, as when she led, in person, the charges of the French army against the English, who had been victorious in France for almost a hundred years, but when she dared the great ecclesiastical courts that badgered and baited her, as she sat unaided, alone, unbefriended, undefended, unadvised by man, for weeks at a time, when the cowardly hounds were determined to send her to the stake. Where did her heroism and courage come from that she, a mere country peasant child, who had never even ridden a horse, or seen a battlefield, who never had read a book, or knew the first thing of guiding and controlling soldiers, or setting an army in battle array; I say, where did her courage come from, that she could dare to go into the proud presence of nobles and warriors and demand that they give her a guard to take her to the King of France, where she assured him that she would soon drive out the English and have him duly crowned king of his reconquered provinces? Here was the radiant life in actual, potent exercise. She radiated courage and faith, just as the sun radiates heat—in such abundance that men sweated with it, men were fired to the intense heat and fervor of new life and courage with it. So that, from a cowed, disheartened pack of whipped men, who fled from the mere sound of approach of a small body of English soldiers, raw recruits, as well as seasoned veterans, shouted to be led against the foe, and when once in the conflict hammered away regardless of wounds, even of death, until victory was theirs.

Whence came this radiant courage and power? It was simply because she dared to listen to the voices speaking to her soul, and nothing else counted. That's the life I want to get hold of. That is the courage and the life I wish to radiate. Afraid of men, of starvation, of opposition, of censure, of hatred, of ostracism? No! Why should we be afraid to lose a few cents, when our hands are filled with diamonds, and rubies, and pearls, and nuggets of gold? Why should we fear men, when we have the courage of our convictions?

Let us look not down, but up, and seek to draw from the heavens above the inspiration, the courage, the bravery, the heroism of the soul.

There has recently passed away in despotic Russia a man whose life for years has radiated moral courage throughout the world. Tolstoi had the courage of his convictions. He felt that social distinctions were wrong. Immediately he did the practical thing—put himself on the plane of every common laboring man by personally becoming a tiller of his own soil. "What a fool!" exclaimed the aristocratic world to which, by birth, he belonged. "Does he think he can change our opinions by that silly act?" they cried. No! He knew it would have little or no effect on them, but he was compelled to clear his own soul. So he braved their laughter and scorn, their contumely and contempt, that the world might know for certain what he really did think and feel.

He came to the conclusion that the Government of Russia, and the conduct of the ministers of the Greek Church—the established church of Russia—were neither in conformity with true religion nor true brotherhood. Though the former was despotic, and the latter as "hide-bound and dogmatic as rigid adherence to dead forms and creeds ever makes men," he fearlessly expressed his inmost convictions against both and called upon them to change, reform, amend their ways and actually become what they professed to be. The state threatened him with Siberian banishment unless he kept silence, but never till death silenced him did he heed the threatening command; the church cast him out, and then he wrote a book, My Religion, that gave newer and more exalted conceptions of religion to the world, even though possibly it would be hard to find a single man who accepts everything just as Tolstoi set it forth in that book.

He came to the decision that the fine clothes and luxurious surroundings of the rich and noble were neither Christian nor humane. They caused envy and bitterness in the hearts of those whose lives were one long struggle with poverty. So at once he cast off his gorgeous apparel, denuded his own rooms of all unnecessary and elaborate furnishings, and thus, again and further, placed himself where men could feel the truth and power of his utterances about human brotherhood.

When Russia declared war against Japan, Tolstoi wrote a letter to the Emperor, the state officials, and the Russian people that was a loud trumpet blast heard throughout the world calling upon them in the name of their Creator and down-trodden humanity to stop! and declare peace. Many a man had been sent to Siberia for life—nay, sent to be speedily tortured to death—for far less than this, but this fearless old man let his voice ring out with a power that convinced thousands as never before that war at its best was but a relic of barbarism and a disgrace to every professedly progressive nation.

Oh, for a courage like Tolstoi's—true-hearted, brave, simple-minded, pure, that never failed when called upon. Granted he was "queer," "quixotic," "unbalanced," "impracticable," was not his queerness and impracticability at least on the side of the moral forces of the world? Everybody knew where and how he stood; where his sympathies were; and his life has strengthened the backbone and put new vigor into the weak knees of hundreds of thousands, for moral courage radiates with power that increases according to the square of the distance. It does not grow less; it enlarges; for each man who feels it becomes a new generator and transformer and thus enlarges and increases its radiating power four-, eight-, twelve-fold.

Henry Bergh was another of these heroic moral-courage radiators. His tender heart was cut to the quick day by day by seeing the cruelties perpetrated upon the poor dumb brutes of the city of New York. He determined to do what he could to stop these barbarous practices. He agitated and wrote, spoke and interviewed until he succeeded in getting ordinances and acts passed which gave him power to prevent whatever cruelties he saw. How he was jeered; how he was cursed, when he sought to interfere with a brutal driver who would cruelly whip his horses to compel them to drag loads beyond their strength! The newspapers said he stood in the way of business, and they sarcastically called him "the knight of the doleful countenance," not realizing that it was the cruelties perpetrated by so-called men upon their younger brothers—the dumb animals—that had so frozen the pain and anguish of his heart upon his face. But his heart never failed, his courage never wavered. Threatened, mobbed, his life often in peril, he fearlessly waged constant warfare against cruelty, and to-day the very city that hated and scorned him is building monuments to his honor in every street-watering trough they erect. And his radiant influence has reached every civilized city in the world, such is the penetrating radiancy of a loving and true heart.

Before I proceed to a further consideration of this radiancy of a large-hearted, moral heroism, I want to answer the objection raised to what I have already written by a young man to whom I read it. He said: "But I am not an Emerson, or a Wendell Phillips, or a John Brown, or Tolstoi. What chance do I have of exercising moral courage?"

A very pertinent question, and one I am glad to try to answer. I do not believe there was ever a man, a time, or a place which did not, sometime, somehow, call for the exercise of moral heroism. And especially in these days of lax principle, breaking down of old standards, political graft, and worship of material success. What minister is there in no matter what church who is not called upon, now and again, nay, often, to speak fearlessly upon some practical subject upon which people are looking for light? Is he a moral hero who taboos such subjects, who refrains from discussing them in the pulpit because they are not "gospel" subjects? What gospel subject can surpass in interest and in human and divine appeal to the soul of man the "white-slave" question, and a host of other subjects upon which ordinary well-to-do men and women need enlightenment? That minister is endowed with the radiant power of moral courage who, even though he offend some of the smug, comfortably righteous members of his congregation, dares to denounce the church people who rent their houses and lands for immoral purposes, for breweries, for saloons, for any and all things that destroy men's bodies and souls and bring suffering to innocent women and children. Take the child-labor question, especially in the communities where men live who have become rich by using child labor, whether in cotton factories, glass factories, tobacco, or any other factories. Should not such men hear the gospel plainly and without equivocation? Who is to give it? The minister of the Christ who came to seek and save the down-trodden, the injured, the forsaken, the lost. Then all honor to the man who dares to speak out, dares to be true to the inward voice, though he lose caste, position, salary.

The same courage is required of the politician. How often the public clamor for, or against, the very opposite of that which is right. In California a few years ago there was a great fight for the exclusion of the Japanese and Chinese. How about the doctrine of the brotherhood of man? Can we play fast and loose with eternal principles? No! Let the true politician stand by the truth and let the poltroon sacrifice his principles for temporary advancement and gain.

There is not an employee who at some time or another is not called upon to exercise moral courage. Some are asked to do dishonest, mean, disreputable, contemptible things—for their employers. Some have one temptation, some another. Stand firm for the highest truth. Be morally brave and courageous. Dare to refuse. Dare to risk losing your job rather than your character. Dare to be poor rather than mean.

One of the great temptations of men and women to-day is to appear better off than they are. We are all as good as everybody else—so we say—and, therefore, we must dress as well, dine as well, live as well, and show off as much. What is the result in many cases? Financial worry or disaster at best; criminality at worst. For many a man to-day is in the penitentiary because he and his wife did not have the moral courage to dare to live within their income; she did not dare to wear her last-year's hat, or a made-over gown, and he did not dare say No! when she insisted upon having new and expensive things, or would not deny himself when his "set" indulged in an expensive pastime which he could not afford. Oh, the pity of it! Let your courage have a chance to grow. Plant the seeds of moral heroism early, so that when the testing time comes you will find the tree already grown to which you can cling.

Every boy and every girl—no matter how young—has times when temptations come which it requires moral courage to resist. Better teach your boy the duty, pleasure, and benefit of this resistance than have him win every other prize of excellent scholarship. Are you radiating such courage so that your children feel it? That they are influenced by it? Happy you, if you are, for it will return to you in the beauty, strength, nobility, and grandeur of your boy's, your girl's, life in after days to your benediction and joy.

The world is cold for want of moral courage. Turn on the radiator. Call on the great source for a full supply and help make the world warm with the heroism, the bravery, the moral courage it needs.

Possessed in any degree, however small, of this heroism of the soul, I, myself, want to radiate the consciousness that my natural and proper place is in the forefront of every movement that makes for human progress. Most men are laggards in human progress. Of comparatively only a few is it said in such things: "He is abreast of his times." Of only the less than few—the solitary, the individual soldiers—is it said: "He is ahead of his times." Here I want to find my place. These are the men and women with whom I would stand. And I would so radiate the spirit of advancement and progress that every awake and alert soul and also every quiescent and sleeping soul will feel and know it when we come in contact.

In November, 1910, there was held in the city of Chicago an anniversary celebration of the life and work of Theodore Parker, a New England Congregational clergyman who lived from 1810 to 1860. When professional philosophers, reformers, and preachers were discussing, in an academic fashion, the question of human freedom, while under our banner of professed "human rights for all," the shackles were on the hands of four millions of slaves, while professional statesmen were temporizing with this iniquitous system and proposing compromises, all of which affected slave owners, and none of them made the slave free, Theodore Parker, in season and out of season at times appropriate and inappropriate, was a flaming firebrand of passionate utterance against the hideous hypocrisy of our national pretense while the rattle of these shackles was in our ears. It was nothing to him that the solid South was against him; it was of no weight to him that many of the "respectable moneyed men" of New England were engaged in the slave trade, and that "practical men of affairs" counseled moderation, toleration, and caution in dealing with so "delicate" a subject. He saw only the horrible facts of human slavery, and that this slavery existed in a land on whose national banner were inscribed the words: "We believe it to be a self-evident truth that all men are created free and equal," and the only delicacy he felt was that the national conscience should be aroused to its hypocrisy, self-deceit, inconsistency, and dishonor, and that the slave-holding and slave-trading business should cease in this "land of the free and home of the brave." We, to whom the Emancipation Proclamation has been familiar ever since its promulgation, cannot conceive the terrible stir, the bitter antagonism, the fierce hostility Parker's clear and ringing words caused at the time of their utterance. In vain his fellow-preachers begged him to be more cautious, to adopt a more conciliatory tone. Like Campanello, who took a bell for his crest, and for his motto the words, "I will not keep silent," he quietly but firmly, calmly but resolutely, refused, and rang out all the louder and more insistently his call to the drugged conscience, sleeping honor, and deadened humanities of his fellow citizens. It was he who inspired in Lincoln that memorable phrase made forever world-famed by his glorious Gettysburg speech: "Government of the people, by the people, for the people." Lincoln spoke November 19, 1863. Parker had written in November, 1846, these words:

By way of parenthesis, it is interesting here to add that in The Christian (a London, England, weekly paper), for September 17, 1910, there was a letter giving an even earlier use of the phrase, as follows:

These facts in the history of a great phrase I am glad to present, but the most important fact is not the name of the originator, but the names of the men who made the phrase live in the hearts of their fellows as biting, stinging, awakening truths. Parker was one of these. Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, John G. Whittier, Lowell, John Brown, Lovejoy, Lincoln, were others. And you and I, friendly reader, are to-day basking in the fuller and larger sunlight of freedom let into the house of our common humanity by the fearless, uncompromising, daring courage of these men.

Let us not be laggards in the army of human progress; nor content even to be abreast with the times. Let us be athirst for deeper waters, clearer streams. Let us get nearer the mountain top than either of these two crowds. Let us drink of the fountain spring itself and know nothing else but the fundamental principles of human relationship, and, drinking of them to the full, go forth and radiate them in their original purity, sweetness, and power, diluted only by our imperfect human expression. Let us, in this and all similar matters, make the words of Browning ours, that we may ringingly declare to the world as well as quietly radiate them:

Let us not merely come in for the rewards of life's conflicts in which the few battle for the rights of the many. Let us be in the forefront of the battle array; even if only as standard-bearers, or buglers, or drummer boys in the forefront of the advance army, and though our hearts are often shaken by human cowardice, let our souls triumph and keep our faces towards the foe, courage at fighting pitch, resolution indomitable, purpose invincible, so that, if fall we must, we shall fall with eyes heavenward, and breast fearlessly exposed to the fire of the enemy.

I know of no conflict now as severe as the fight for the abolition of the slave, yet I am in the fight to help women gain the suffrage, and in the temperance reform. I have been abused by my scientific friends as an anti-vaccinator and anti-vivisectionist; have been threatened with a thrashing several times for interfering with brutal teamsters and others who were cruel to animals and children; have lost caste and position (with a few people) because I would rebuke corporate injustice, greed, and tyranny; I have cast behind me much money because it was offered me in exchange for my independence and freedom. These are small things as compared with the heroic acts of the giants of past days, but they are the deeds my soul has been called to face. And I mention them not in boasting, but as another "declaration of principles," principles I wish to radiate on every hand, under all circumstances, to all people.

For I am anxious and determined that, according to the best of my ability, I will do my share of the work of my time for the benefit of the future. What would we be to-day without the advantages of Magna Charta, of the Bill of Rights, of the Declaration of Independence, of the Emancipation Proclamation? Who won these charters of our liberty? The heroes of the past. Then the questions I constantly ask myself are: "What are you doing to add to these liberties to hand on to future ages? You have received freely; how are you giving? I want to help make the future more glad and blessed, just as my present has been made glad by the actions of the heroes of old. I have been inspired to high resolves, heroic endeavors, blessed ambitions by what they achieved. Am I doing anything to pass on these high inspirations to endeavor and ambition? These men met obloquy, hatred, shame, contumely, contempt, danger, financial loss, physical peril, and in John Brown's, Lovejoy's, and other cases, death, because of their daring advocacy of unpopular movements. Shall I be any the less a man than they? Shall I have received so much, and then be craven and pass on so little?"

I believe that each generation must pay interest in kind on all their heritage of the past, or they mark the period of a nation's decline. Unless we are better, nobler, truer, more advanced, more free, more progressive, more generous, more philanthropic, more daring, courageous, lion-hearted than our forefathers, we have defaulted in our interest. And defaulters are always cowards if nothing worse. Let us not be cowards.

In California there are strong movements against the Japanese and the Chinese. It is easy to join the popular side, but it takes strength of heart and courage of mind and body sometimes to stand on the other side. I want to radiate my firm and unshakable conviction of the truth of human brotherhood, regardless of color, nationality, prejudice, or selfish and personal interest. Though the Japanese and Chinese, in open and honest business competition, take away my work, even then I want to radiate my firm belief in the universal brotherhood of man. And I want to do it without hesitation, as well as without fear. Hesitation too often means temporizing, evasion, shuffling, and I do not want to place myself open to any temptation to these things. Hence I would be prompt and outspoken in my adherence and advocacy of the fundamental principles of human brotherhood regardless of personal consequences and indifferent alike to praise or blame.

I believe in human democracy, in human freedom, in the equality of men and women; in morality, government, and household control; in resisting all tyrannies, whether of law, medicine, theology, or society; in the uplift of all the criminal and downtrodden; in the fair division of the profits of all labor; in the jealous preservation of the independence of every man and every woman; in the right of every child to be well born and welcomed, and of every woman to determine, without dictation from any one, whether she shall bear a child or not; in the abolition of all war; in the disarmament of all nations; in the abolition of land monopoly; in submitting every question to the test—the greatest possible good to the greatest number. These, as I now recall them, are the cardinal principles of my belief, my adherence to which I would fearlessly, without hesitation or equivocation, ever and always radiate.