aggressive, others must be non-resistant, if there is to be any kind of
order. This is the present constitution of society, and to the mixture
we owe many of our blessings. But the aggressive members of society
are always tending to become bullies, robbers, and swindlers; and no
one believes that such a state of things as we now live in is the
millennium. It is meanwhile quite possible to conceive an imaginary
society in which there should be no aggressiveness, but only sympathy
and fairness--any small community of true friends now realizes such a
society. Abstractly considered, such a society on a large scale would
be the millennium, for every good thing might be realized there with no
expense of friction. To such a millennial society the saint would be
entirely adapted. His peaceful modes of appeal would be efficacious
over his companions, and there would be no one extant to take advantage
of his non-resistance. The saint is therefore abstractly a higher type
of man than the "strong man," because he is adapted to the highest
society conceivable, whether that society ever be concretely possible
or not. The strong man would immediately tend by his presence to make
that society deteriorate. It would become inferior in everything save
in a certain kind of bellicose excitement, dear to men as they now are.

But if we turn from the abstract question to the actual situation, we
find that the individual saint may be well or ill adapted, according to
particular circumstances. There is, in short, no absoluteness in the
excellence of sainthood. It must be confessed that as far as this
world goes, anyone who makes an out-and-out saint of himself does so at
his peril. If he is not a large enough man, he may appear more
insignificant and contemptible, for all his saintship, than if he had
remained a worldling.[223] Accordingly religion has seldom been so
radically taken in our Western world that the devotee could not mix it
with some worldly temper. It has always found good men who could follow
most of its impulses, but who stopped short when it came to
non-resistance. Christ himself was fierce upon occasion. Cromwells,
Stonewall Jacksons, Gordons, show that Christians can be strong men
also.

[223] We all know DAFT saints, and they inspire a queer kind of
aversion. But in comparing saints with strong men we must choose
individuals on the same intellectual level. The under-witted strong
man homologous in his sphere