Mark I am not speaking against athletic sports.  I like to see a well and honestly played game, and I would join in the clapping when a man makes a clever stroke.  What I object to is the crazy and almost delirious worship which is given to these champions of the sporting world.  It is the excess of the thing that proves a diseased state of mind.  There is more fuss made over some youth who scores a few hundreds on the cricket-field, than there would be over a man who had saved six hundred lives.  In hundreds of journals his portrait appears, and his doings are chronicled as if he had wrought some deliverance for the nation.  Poor lad, it is not his fault that he has sprung up suddenly into fame, it is the fault of the people who love to have these things so.  It is because men have gone pleasure-mad and sport-mad, and in their madness cannot see the difference between a clever athlete and a mental or moral giant.  We prove what our own tastes are, we prove the quality of our own hearts and minds, we prove our own debasement, when we exalt physical strength above excellence of character, when we make our heroes out of muscle instead of soul, when we worship those who serve our pleasure more than those who set us examples of noble things, and lead the way in them.  It is only another rendering of the old shout, “Away with this man, and release unto us Barabbas.”  Not so wicked, of course, but equally foolish and unworthy.

Who are your heroes?  That is the question.  Or in other words, What sort of men do you admire most?  Answer that, and I know at once what sort of men and women you are.  If you are worshippers of pleasure, the champions of the pleasure-world will be your idols and kings.  If you are rooted and grounded in the love of lucre, the successful millionaire is the man that you will fawn upon or worship from afar.  If your main delight is in intellectual things, the great thinkers and writers will be the men to whom you look up with reverence.  And if you are good men, with a passionate love for goodness, and a constant striving to be better than you are, there are none whom you will admire with all your hearts except the good, except the best, and those who are leading in the way of goodness.

In a land which is truly Christian, the only heroes will be those who most resemble Christ.  If we are truly Christians, and Christian thoughts have taken full possession of our hearts, we shall recognise no heroes save those who serve as Christ served, who live in a measure as Christ lived, who deny themselves for others, and spend their strength for the benefit of their fellow-men as the Master did.  These are the true heroes, and all the others are more or less cheap imitations of them, or false substitutes for them.  These are the true heroes, I say.  The men and women who risk their lives to save other lives.  The men who use their strength and ability, not for pay, but for the good and the advancement of their fellow-men, to save men from their sins, and to lessen the sum of human ill.  The brave men and women who venture all things to serve some great and righteous cause, and to speed on the Kingdom of Christ and righteousness in the world.