commonwealth.  It is, perhaps, worth while to remark, in passing, that this consciousness of right is a source of power which belongs specially to the oppressed, and which, other things being equal, will always insure to them the victory; and, when other things are not equal, it is frequently sufficient, of itself, to outweigh a vast preponderance of physical force.  It is, moreover, efficient in proportion to the purity of the moral principle of a people.  We hence perceive the elements of superiority which, by the constitution of our nature, have been bestowed upon virtue.

Another illustration of the power of the moral principle, is seen in the sentiments with which we contemplate the character of confessors, martyrs, and men of every age, who have sacrificed every thing else for the sake of adherence to righteousness.  The highest glory of human nature is to love right better than life, and to obey the dictates of conscience at every conceivable hazard.  Even falsehood, when sealed with blood, acquires not unfrequently, for a time, an irrepressible power.  Truth, when uttered from the stake, or on the scaffold, becomes absolutely irresistible.  We admire Plato, surrounded by listening princes, and vieing with them in oriental magnificence; but we venerate Socrates in his dungeon, patiently suffering death for holding forth the truth; and the dictates of our own bosoms spontaneously assign to him the highest place among the uninspired teachers of wisdom.  Or, to turn to more awful examples, the foundations of the Christian religion were laid in blood.  The Captain of our salvation “was obedient unto death, the death of the cross.”  The martyrdoms of the early age of the church gave to the world examples of the love of right, of which it had never before conceived even the possibility, and thus set on foot a moral reformation, which is destined to work in the character of man a universal transformation.

* * * * *

=_Horace Mann, 1796-1859._= (Manual, p. 532.)

From “Lectures on various Subjects.”

=_158._= THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN.

In this country most young men are poor.  Time is the rock from which they are to hew out their fortunes; and health, enterprise, and integrity, the instruments with which to do it.  For this, diligence in business, abstinence from pleasures, privation even, of everything that does not endanger health, are to be joyfully welcomed and borne.  When we look around us, and see how much of the wickedness of the world springs from poverty, it seems to sanctify all honest efforts for the acquisition of an independence; but when an independence is acquired, then comes the moral crisis, then comes an Ithuriel test, which shows whether a man is higher than a common man, or lower than a common reptile.  In the duty of accumulation—­and I call it a duty, in the most strict and literal signification of that word—­all below a competence