self or to
others, and I have had to make up since for all the moral degeneration,
item by item, but the things I got with the degeneration when I got
it--habits of imagination, and expression, headway of personality--are
the things that have given me all my inspirations for being moral
since." "What love of liberty I have," Wendell Phillips seems to say, "I
got from loving my own." It is the boy who loves his liberty so much
that he insists on having it to do wrong with, as well as right, who in
the long run gets the most right done. The basis of character is moral
experiment and almost all the men who have discovered different or
beautiful or right habits of life for men, have discovered them by doing
wrong long enough. (The ice is thin at this point, Gentle Reader, for
many of us, perhaps, but it has held up our betters.) The fact of the
matter seems to be that a man's conscience in this world, especially if
it is an educated one, or borrowed from his parents, can get as much in
his way as anything else. There is no doubt that The Great Spirit
prefers to lead a man by his conscience, but if it cannot be done, if a
man's conscience has no conveniences for being led, He leads him against
his conscience. The doctrine runs along the edge of a precipice (like
all the best ones), but if there is one gift rather than another to be
prayed for in this world it is the ability to recognise the crucial
moment that sometimes comes in a human life--the moment when The
Almighty Himself gets a man--against his conscience--to do right. It
seems to be the way that some consciences are meant to grow, by trying
wrong things on a little. Thousands of inferior people can be seen every
day stumbling over their sins to heaven, while the rest of us are
holding back with our virtues. It has been intimated from time to time
in this world that all men are sinners. Inasmuch as things are arranged
so that men can sin in doing right things, and sin in doing wrong ones
both, they can hardly miss it. The real religion of every age seems to
have looked a little askance at perfection, even at purity, has gone its
way in a kind of fine straightforwardness, has spent itself in an
inspired blundering, in progressive noble culminating moral experiment.

The basis for a great character seems to be the capacity for intense
experience with the character one already has. So far as most of us can
judge, experience, in proportion as it has been conclusive and
e