anhood at chosen moments when least expected; some of them
are the real time in which we live. It was said of old that great men
were creative in their souls, and left their works to be their race;
these ideal heroes have immortal souls for their children, age after
age. Shall we in our youth, then, in generous emulation idealize the
great of old times, and honour them as our fair example of what we most
would be? Shall we, in our hearts, idealize those we love,--so natural
is it to believe in the perfection of those we love,--and even if the
time for forgiveness comes, and we show them the mercy that our own
frailty teaches us to exercise, shall we still idealize them, since love
continues only in the persuasion of perfection yet to come, and is the
tenderer because it comes with struggle? Whether in our acts or our
emotions shall we give idealism this range, and deny it to literature
which discloses the habits of our daily practice in more perfection and
with greater beauty? There we find the purest types to raise and sustain
us; to direct our choice, and reenforce us with that emotion, that
passion, which most supports the will in its effort. There history
itself is taken up, transformed, and made immortal, the whole past of
human emotion and action contained and shown forth with convincing
power. Nor is it only with the natural habit of mankind that idealism
falls in, but with divine command. Were we not bid be perfect as our
Father in heaven is perfect? And what is that image of the Christ, what
is that world-ideal, the height of human thought, but the work of the
creative reason,--not of genius, not of the great in mind and fortunate
in gifts, but of the race itself, in proud and humble, in saint and
sinner, in the happy and the wretched, in all the vast range of the
millions of the dead whose thoughts live embodied in that great
tradition,--the supreme and perfected pattern of mankind?

Is it nevertheless true that there is falsehood in all this? that men
were never such as the heart believes them, nor ideal characters able to
breathe mortal air? by indulging our emotions, do we deceive ourselves,
and end at last in cynicism or despair? Why, then, should we not boldly
affirm that the falsehood is rather in us, in the defects by which we
fail of perfection, in our ignorant error and voluntary wrong? that in
the ideal, free as it is from the accidental and the transitory,
inclusive as it is of the common truth, lies