ample, in the
fact that neither of them resembles the original, and that both of them
commonly tone down not only all a man's vices, but all the more amusing
of his virtues. But they are treated in one respect differently. We
never hear anything about biography without hearing something about the
sanctity of private life and the necessity for suppressing the whole of
the most important part of a man's existence. The sculptor does not work
at this disadvantage. The sculptor does not leave out the nose of an
eminent philanthropist because it is too beautiful to be given to the
public; he does not depict a statesman with a sack over his head because
his smile was too sweet to be endurable in the light of day. But in
biography the thesis is popularly and solidly maintained, so that it
requires some courage even to hint a doubt of it, that the better a man
was, the more truly human life he led, the less should be said about it.

For this idea, this modern idea that sanctity is identical with secrecy,
there is one thing at least to be said. It is for all practical purposes
an entirely new idea; it was unknown to all the ages in which the idea
of sanctity really flourished. The record of the great spiritual
movements of mankind is dead against the idea that spirituality is a
private matter. The most awful secret of every man's soul, its most
lonely and individual need, its most primal and psychological
relationship, the thing called worship, the communication between the
soul and the last reality--this most private matter is the most public
spectacle in the world. Anyone who chooses to walk into a large church
on Sunday morning may see a hundred men each alone with his Maker. He
stands, in truth, in the presence of one of the strangest spectacles in
the world--a mob of hermits. And in thus definitely espousing publicity
by making public the most internal mystery, Christianity acts in
accordance with its earliest origins and its terrible beginning. It was
surely by no accident that the spectacle which darkened the sun at
noonday was set upon a hill. The martyrdoms of the early Christians were
public not only by the caprice of the oppressor, but by the whole desire
and conception of the victims.

The mere grammatical meaning of the word 'martyr' breaks into pieces at
a blow the whole notion of the privacy of goodness. The Christian
martyrdoms were more than demonstrations: they were advertisements. In
our day the new theory of