He who has the clearest and intensest vision of what is at issue in the great battle of life, and who quits himself in it most manfully, will be the first to acknowledge that for him there has been no approach to victory except by the faithful doing day by day of the work which lay at his own threshold.

On the other hand, the universal experience of mankind—the[62] dreary confession of those who have merely sought a “low thing,” and “gone on adding one to one;” making that the aim and object of their lives—unite in warning us that on these lines no true victory can be had, either for the man himself or for the cause he was sent into the world to maintain.

No, there is no victory possible without humility and magnanimity; and no humility or magnanimity possible without an ideal. Now there is not one amongst us all who has not heard the call in his own heart to put aside all evil habits, and to live a brave, simple, truthful life. It is no modern, no Christian experience, this. The choice of Hercules, and numberless other Pagan stories, the witness of nearly all histories and all literatures, attest that it is an experience common to all our race. It is of it that the poet is thinking in those fine lines of Emerson which are written up in the Hall of Marlborough College:
“So close is glory to our dust,
So near is God to man—
When duty whispers low, ‘thou must,’
The youth replies, ‘I can.’”

It is this whisper, this call, which is the ground of what I have, for want of a better name, been speaking of as idealism. Just in so far as one ............