And when the time arrives
in any country when wealth has so corrupted, or pleasure so
depraved, or faction so infatuated the people, that honour, order,
obedience, virtue, and loyalty have seemingly become things of the
past; then, amidst the darkness, when honest men--if, haply,
there be such left--are groping about and feeling for each
other's hands, their only remaining hope will be in the
restoration and elevation of Individual Character; for by that
alone can a nation be saved; and if character be irrecoverably
lost, then indeed there will be nothing left worth saving.
NOTES
(1) Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, Lord High Treasurer under Elizabeth
and James I.
(2) 'Life of Perthes,' ii. 217.
(3) Lockhart's 'Life of Scott.'
(4) Debate on the Petition of Right, A.D. 1628.
(5) The Rev. F. W. Farrer's 'Seekers after God,' p. 241.
(6) 'The Statesman,' p. 30.
(7) 'Queen of the Air,' p. 127
(8) Instead of saying that man is the creature of Circumstance, it
would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of
Circumstance. It is Character which builds an existence out of
Circumstance. Our strength is measured by our plastic power.
From the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels:
one warehouses, another villas. Bricks and mortar are mortar and
bricks, until the architect can make them something else. Thus it
is that in the same family, in the same circumstances, one man
rears a stately edifice, while his brother, vacillating and
incompetent, lives for ever amid ruins: the block of granite,
which was an obstacle on the pathway of the weak, becomes a
stepping-stone on the pathway of the strong.
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