THE STUFF OF MANHOOD SOME NEEDED NOTES IN AMERICAN CHARACTER

The moral elements of individual character are inevitably social. And the social obligation immensely strengthens the sanctions which enjoin them. When a man “has trained himself,” to use the words of Lord Morley in dealing with Voltaire’s religion, “to look upon every wrong in thought, every duty omitted from act, each infringement of the inner spiritual law which humanity is constantly perfecting for its own guidance and advantage ... as an ungrateful infection, weakening and corrupting the future of his brothers,” he views each struggle within his own soul against evil and each firm aspiration after purity not as a mere incident in his own spiritual biography but as a fight for social good and for the perfecting of the nation and of humanity. And the struggle for social good and the perfecting of human life is fundamentally a struggle for the triumph of ideals in personal wills. God can take hold of men only in man. He revealed Himself and wrought redemption less by a social process than by a personal incarnation. And the only way of which we know to uplift the life of the nation and to fit it for its mission and its ministry[8] is to reform our own and other men’s characters, and ourselves to be what manner of man among men we would have the nation be among nations.