That is the strange part of the inner conscience, that it seems
so wholly independent of tradition or convention.
And it is from this sense of a burden, borne without hope of
redemption, that we would all of us give our most prized possessions to
be free; it is this which has cast such an awful power into the hands
of the unscrupulous people who have claimed to be able to atone for, to
loose, to set free the ailing soul. Face to face with the terror of
darkness, there is hardly anything of which mankind will not repent;
and I have sometimes thought that the darkest and heaviest temptation
in the whole world is the temptation to yield to a craven fear, when
the sincere conscience does not condemn.
XXI
I listened the other day, at a public function, to an eloquent
panegyric, pronounced by a man of great ability and sympathetic
cultivation, on the Greek spirit. I fell for the moment entirely under
the spell of his lofty rhetoric, his persuasive and illuminating
argument. I wish I could reproduce what he said; but it was like a
strain of beautiful music, and my mind was so much delighted by his
rich eloquence, his subtle transitions, his deft modulations, that I
had neither time nor opportunity to commit what he said to memory. One
thing he said which struck me very much, that the Greek spirit
resembled rather the modern scientific spirit than any other of the
latter-day developments of thought.
Pages:
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145