Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/231

Rh words, his want of courage, in so far as courage is a mere affair of nerves, was a fact conspicuous to all. Equally conspicuous and undeniable was the antagonism put forth against this nervous bodily trepidation. And what was this antagonism? What but the struggle between consciousness and cowardice? a struggle by and through which the latter was dragged into light and vanquished; and then the hero went forth into the thickest ranks of danger, strong in the consciousness of his own weakness, and as if out of very spite of the natural coward that wished to hold him back, and who rode shaking in his saddle as he drove into the hottest of the fight. Natural courage, depending upon temperament, will quail at times, and prove faithless to its trust; the strongest nerves will often shake, in the hour of danger, like an aspen in the gale; but what conceivable terrors can daunt that fortitude (though merely of a negative character), that indomitable discipline, wherewith a man, by a stern and deliberate consciousness of his own heart's frailty, meets, crushes, and subjugates, at every turn, and in its remotest hold, the entire passion of fear?

Human strength, then, has no positive character of its own; it is nothing but the clear consciousness of human weakness. Neither has human morality any positive character of its own; it is nothing but the clear consciousness of human wickedness. The whole rudiments of morality are laid before us, if we will but admit the fact (for which we have Scripture