Most treacherous
and insidious the temptation will come to the man, young and able,
everywhere. It will say, "You have ability; come into the light--only
put that by; it keeps you obscure. And what purpose does it serve now?
Be practical; come." And you may weaken and yield and enter the light
for the general applause, but the old idea will rankle deep down till
smothered out, and you will stand in the splendour--a failure,
miserable, hopeless, not apparent, indeed, but for all that, final. You
may stand your ground, refuse the bribe, uphold the flag, and be rated
a fool and a failure, but they who rate you so will not understand that
you have won a battle greater than all the triumphs of empires; you will
keep alive in your soul true light and enduring beauty; you will hear
the music eternally in the heart of the high enthusiast and have vision
of ultimate victory that has sustained all the world over the efforts of
centuries, that uplifts the individual, consolidates the nation, and
leads a wandering race from the desert into the Promised Land.
VI
If we are to justify ourselves in our time we must have done with
dispensations. Many honest men are astray on this point and think
attitudes justifiable that are at the root of all our failures. What is
the weakness? It is so simple to explain and so easy to understand that
one must wonder how we have been ignoring it quietly and generally so
long.
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