go any faster than you can advance the
average moral judgments of the mass, but you can go at least as fast as
that, and you can see to it that you do not lag behind the average moral
judgments of the mass. I have in my life dealt with all sorts and
conditions of men, and I have found that the flame of moral judgment
burned just as bright in the man of humble life and limited experience
as in the scholar and the man of affairs. And I would like his voice
always to be heard, not as a witness, not as speaking in his own case,
but as if he were the voice of men in general, in our courts of justice,
as well as the voice of the lawyers, remembering what the law has been.
My hope is that, being stirred to the depths by the extraordinary
circumstances of the time in which we live, we may recover from those
depths something of a renewal of that vision of the law with which men
may be supposed to have started out in the old days of the oracles, who
communed with the intimations of divinity.
THE POWER OF CHRISTIAN YOUNG MEN
[Address at the Young Men's Christian Association's Celebration,
Pittsburgh, October 24, 1914.]
MR. PRESIDENT, MR. PORTER, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:
I feel almost as if I were a truant, being away from Washington to-day,
but I thought that perhaps if I were absent the Congress would have the
more leisure to adjourn. I do not ordinarily open my office at
Washington on Saturday. Being a schoolmaster, I am accustomed to a
Saturday holiday, and I thought I could not better spend a holiday than
by showing at least something of the true direction of my affections;
for by long association with the men who have worked for this
organization I can say that it has enlisted my deep affection.
I am interested in it for various reasons. First of all, because it is
an association of young men. I have had a good deal to do with young men
in my time, and I have formed an impression of them which I believe to
be contrary to the general impression. They are generally thought to be
arch radicals. As a matter of fact, they are the most conservative
people I have ever dealt with. Go to a college community and try to
change the least custom of that little world and find how the
conservatives will rush at you. Moreover, young men are embarrassed by
having inherited their fathers' opinions. I have often said that the use
of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as
possible. I do not say that wit
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