Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/159

Rh courage which comes of tough muscles and rigid nerves, — of a stomach which never surrenders. That also is a good thing, the hardihood of the flesh ; let me do it no injustice. But I mean the higher, moral courage, which can look danger and death in the face unawed and undismayed; the courage that can encounter loss of ease, of wealth, of friends, of your own good name; the courage that can face a world full of howling and of scorn,—ay, of loathing and of hate; can see all these with a smile, and, suffering it all, can still toil on, conscious of the result, yet fearless still. I do not mean the courage that hates, that smites, that kills, but the calm courage that loves and heals and blesses such as smite and hate ' and kill; the courage that dares resist evil, popular, powerful, anointed evil, yet does it with good, and knows it shall thereby overcome. That is not a common quality. I think it never comes without religion. It belongs to all great forms of religious excellence; it is not specifically Hebrew or Christian, but generically human and of religion under all forms.

Without this courage a man looks little and mean, especially a man otherwise great,—with great intellect and great culture, and occupying a great place. You see all about you how little such men are worth; too cowardly to brave a temporary defeat, they are swiftly brought to permanent ruin. Look over the long array of brilliant names in American, English, universal history, and see what lofty men, born to a large estate of intellect, and disciplined to manifold and brilliant mental power, for lack of courage to be true amid the false, and upright amid the grovelling, have laid their proud foreheads in the dust, and mean men have triumphed over the mighty ! Did you never read here in your Old Testament, here in your New Testament, here in your Apocrypha, how religion gave men, yea, and women too, this courage, and said to them, "Be strong and very courageous; turn not to the right hand, neither to the left,"—and made heroes out of Jeremiah and Elias?

Did you never read of the strength of courage, the courage of conscience, which religion gave to the "unlearned and ignorant men," who, from peasants that trembled before a Hebrew Kabbi's copious beard, became apostles to stand before the wrath of kings and not quake, to found churches by their prayers,