th the cross upon His back and the railing mob
behind Him and before, and never once to falter and complain. Hated and
hooted by the multitudes who at one time followed Him gladly, deserted
even by the twelve who had pledged to Him their lives, misunderstood,
despised, condemned, spat upon--a stranger even to His mother and His
brethren--what a fate was this! And what consummate heroism was needed
to meet it unafraid! In the face of such a supreme spectacle of
sacrifice as this, how foolish, how unjust to identify the hero, to any
degree of exclusiveness with the soldier. The soldier is a hero, without
doubt, but greater than he is the hero who bears not arms but a cross,
wears not a crown of laurel but a crown of thorns, and dies not on the
field of battle but on "the field of the skull." "He was despised and
rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; one from
whom men hid their faces; * * * he was oppressed, stricken, smitten of
God * * * yet when he was afflicted he opened not his mouth"--of whom
such things as this may be truly said, He is the noblest hero of them
all. James Russell Lowell has set forth this abiding truth in his
Present Crisis:

"Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes--they were souls who stood alone,
While the men they agonized for, hurled the contumelious stone,
Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline,
To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,
By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design."

Such are the types of heroism which I have thought it well to bring to
your attention this afternoon. Accepting the soldier as the traditional
and not unworthy standard of all heroic types, I have nevertheless tried
to show that there are other men who meet all the hazards of suffering
and death which he encounters, and yet are denied the aids and comforts
which are his. I have contrasted the utter commonplaces of the obscure
heroisms of daily life with the pomp and pageantry of martial life. I
have contrasted the awful solitude of the men who made new paths and
faced unfamiliar perils on prairie, desert and arctic sea, with the
cheerful comradeship which hallows the experience of the soldier. And I
have contrasted the popular acclaim which is the very breath of the
warrior's nostrils with the popular odium and hatred which kill the
prophets of the new and better day. Thus have I moved from what I
believe to be, from its ve