slaves.  If ever I knew a man whose resolution was “steeled,” it was this honoured friend of my early manhood, and the steeling power was simply love.  A humbler illustration of the same spirit may be supplied by the instance of one whom worldly people ridiculed and who “for fifty years seized every chance of doing kindness to a man who had tormented him at school”; and this though a boy’s nature is “wax to receive, and marble to retain.”  The name of E. C. Hawtrey is little remembered now even by Eton men, but this tribute to the power of love ought not to be withheld.

I am only too painfully aware that we live just now in conditions in which love must take the aspect of severity; in which the mind must be “steeled” and the resolution “set” for a solemn work of international justice.  But hatred will not help us; for hatred is fundamentally at variance with that moral law which we daily and hourly invoke as the sanction of our enterprise.  Hatred is natural enough, and at least as old as the Fall of Man; but its doom was pronounced by a Teacher Who said to His disciples:  “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another.”  Twelve men heard and heeded that new commandment, and they changed the face of the world.  Are we to abjure the doctrine which wrought this change, and give heed to the blind guides who would lure us straight back to barbarism?

  “What though they come with scroll and pen,
     And grave as a shaven clerk,
   By this sign shall ye know them,
     That they ruin and make dark;

  “By thought a crawling ruin,
     By life a leaping mire,
   By a broken heart in the breast of the world,
     And the end of the world’s desire;

  “By God and man dishonoured,
     By death and life made vain,
   Know ye the old Barbarian,
     The Barbarian come again."[*]

[Footnote *:  G. K. Chesterton.]

VII

THE TRIUMPHS OF ENDURANCE

“By your endurance ye shall make your souls your own.”  If the origin of this saying were unknown, one could fancy much ingenious conjecture about it; but no one, I think, would attribute it to an English source.  An Englishman’s idea of self-realization is action.  If he is to be truly himself he must be doing something; life for him means energy.  To be laid on one side, and to exist only as a spectator or a sufferer, is the last method of making his soul his own which would occur to him. Dolce far niente is a phrase which could never have originated on English soil.  The greater the difficulties by which he is confronted, the more gnawing becomes the Englishman’s, hunger for action.  “Something must be done!” is his instinctive cry when dangers or perplexities arise, and he is feverishly eager to do it.  What exactly “it” should be, and how it may be most wisely done, are secondary, and even tertiary, considerations.  “Wisdom is profitable to direct”; but the need for wisdom is not so generally recognized in England as the need for courage or promptitude or vigour.