Principles + 

I have often reproached myself that principles have done so little for me. It is not that I have not got any. I have been for years familiar with all the wisest and noblest principles which are to be found in philosophical and religious books from the time of Moses downwards. Nor is it a failing of mine that I have not the courage or strength to apply principles. I am weak as other men are, and liable to yield to temptation; but this is not my main difficulty; my trouble is that I never know how to apply my principles. Take a case: It is true that every man ought to be satisfied with the limitations of his own nature. He ought not to repine that he cannot write poems or carve statues. The principle is of some service when the question is of poems or statues; but I should be equally helped without it, for the most uncultivated of mortals is not so foolish as to be melancholy because he cannot fly. At other times, when I most need assistance, and call upon this principle to aid me, I am all adrift. I am placed in such a position, for example, that it is my duty to exercise control over somebody below me. I ought to tell him that he is going wrong and put him right, but I feel that I cannot, and that he is too strong for me. This may be mere conquerable cowardice, or it may be that in this direction I am as limited as I am in relation to poems or statues. I do not know. When I have done what I think I can do, am I to sit down contented and say I can do no more, or am I to listen to a voice which forever prompts me and whispers, “All you can do you have not done?” + 

During the major portion of my life I am the victim of antagonisms, and each opposing force seems able to plead equal justification. This, however, is the system on which the world is built. It is a mistake to expect a principle to be anything else than abstract. An act is concrete, and that means that it is something in which oppositions find their solution and lie in repose. This, it will be said, leaves us just where we were and gives us no assistance. It is a just criticism. Man is man because he possesses the proud prerogative of actualising the abstract. He is not its fool. In each deed he does he has to be aware of two poles, and say, “Between them, doing justice to both, I fix this deed so.” Instead of two poles there may be a dozen or more, not exactly poles, but divergent or opposite pulls. The richer the nature is, the more there will be of them; the stronger the nature, the more perfect will be the harmony in which they will all meet in external life. + 

To know principles, although at first it seems as if the consciousness of them is of no service to us, is really an enormous benefit. The more we have, if we have only the gift to manage them, the more real and less shadowy shall we be. Let it ever be remembered that the reality of an act or of a man is in exact proportion to the number of principles which lie in that man or act, and that the single abstract is unreality, unsubstantiality, uselessness. Let us not be cast down at our difficulties. Let us rejoice rather at the exalted, the divine task that is imposed on us. Man is the very top of the creation, the express image of the Creator, because at every moment of his life he resolves abstracts into realities. + 

The curse of every truth is that a counterfeit of it always waits on it, and is its greatest enemy. What is this which I have said but the mere commonplace that we must never go too far, and that compromise is the rule of life. But between my doctrine and this commonplace there is a great difference. The commonplace teaches that no principle is ultimately efficacious; that it is to be trusted to a certain arbitrary point, and beyond that it somehow ceases to be valid. The truth, on the other hand, is that every principle is efficacious up to the uttermost, and that faith in it is never to be abandoned. The compromise comes of imbecility or impotence, and is essentially contrary to the concrete reconciliation of abstracts. + 

It is difficult to separate morals from wisdom, and in fact no clear line of demarcation is possible; but perhaps we may say that in morals a single clear principle is more distinctly supreme than in wisdom. Morality is the region of the abstract. It is mercifully provided that that which is of the most importance to us in the conduct of life should be under the dominion of the abstract, and therefore be plain to everybody. There is no wit necessary in order to discover what we ought to do when the question is one of telling a lie or speaking the truth. This seems to me as valid a distinction between morality and wisdom as any I know. The abstractness of the moral law gives it a certain sublimity and ideality which is very remarkable. + 

Perpetual undying faith in principles is of the utmost importance. I sometimes think it is the very Alpha and Omega of life. Belief in principles is the only intelligible interpretation I have ever been able to attach to the word faith. A man with faith in principles, even if they be not first-rate, is sure to succeed. The man who has no faith in them is sure to fail. Nothing finer after all can be said of faith than that which is said in the epistle to the Hebrews, and no finer example can be given of it than that of Noah there given. Noah was warned of God that destruction would visit the impious race by which he was surrounded. He quietly set to work to build his ark. There is no record that it was built by miracle, and he must have been a long time about it. Glorious days of unclouded sunshine with no hint of rain, weeks perhaps of drought, must have passed over his head as he sat and wrought at this wondrous structure. Imagine the scoffs of the irreverent Canaanites, the jeers of the mob which passed by or peeped over fences; imagine the suggestions of lunacy! Worse and worse, imagine what was said and done when, seven days before the rain, though not a drop had fallen, the pious man with all his family, and with that wonderful troop of animals, entered the ark, and the Lord shut him in. But God had spoken to him he had heard a divine word, and in that word he believed, despite the absence of a single fleck of vapour in the sky. What a time, though, it must have been for him during those seven days! Would it come true? Would he have to walk out again down those planks with the clean beasts and unclean beasts after him, amidst the inextinguishable laughter of all his pagan, God-denying neighbours? But in a week he heard the first growl of the tempest. He was justified, God was justified; and forevermore Noah stands as a divine type of what we call faith. This is really it. What we have once heard, really heard in our best moments, by that let us abide. There are multitudes of moments in which intelligent conviction in the truth of principles disappears, and we are able to do nothing more than fall back on mere dogged determinate resolution to go on; not to give up what we have once found to be true. This power of dogged determinate resolution, which acts independently of enthusiasm, is a precious possession. A principle cannot forever appear to us in its pristine splendour. Not only are we tempted to forsake it by other and counter attractions, but it gets wearisome to us because it is a principle. It becomes a fetter, we think. Then it is that faith comes into operation. We hold fast, and by and bye a third state follows the second, and we emerge into confidence again. One would like to have a record of all that passed through the soul of Ulysses when he was rowed past the Sirens. In what intellectually subtle forms did not the desire to stay clothe itself to that intellectually subtle soul? But he had bound himself beforehand, and he reached Ithaca and Penelope at last. I remember once having determined after much deliberation that I ought to undertake a certain task which would occupy me for years. It was one which I could at any moment relinquish. After six months I began to flag, and my greatest hindrance was, not the confessed desire for rest, but all kinds of the most fascinating principles or pseudo principles which flattered what was best and not what was worst in me. I was narrowing my intellect, preventing the proper enjoyment of life, neglecting the sunshine, etc. etc. But I thought to myself, “Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field,” and that his temptation specially was that “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.” I was enabled to persevere, oftentimes through no other motive than that aforesaid divine doggedness, and presently I was rewarded. + 

As an instance of the necessity of reconciling principles, the experience of advancing years may be taken. A man must forever keep himself open to the reception of new light. As he gets older, he will find that the tendency grows to admit nothing into his mind which does not corroborate something he has already believed, and that the new truth acquired is very limited. If he wishes to keep himself young he must use his utmost efforts to maintain his susceptibility. He must not converse solely with himself and turn over and over again the thoughts of the past. He must not in reading a book dwell upon those passages only which are a reflection of his own mind. This is true, but it is also true that he must put certain principles beyond debate. Life is too short to admit of the perpetual discussion and re-discussion of what is fundamental and has been settled after bestowing on it all the care of which we are capable. If, by reason of patient and long-continued experiment, we have found out, for example, that a certain regimen is good for us, we should be foolish, at the bidding of even a scientific man, to begin experimenting again. We must simply say that this matter is once for all at rest, whether rightly or wrongly, and that our days here are but threescore years and ten. Neither can we afford to make quite certain between opposing principles. The demand for certainty is a sign of weakness, and if we persist in it induces paralysis. The successful man is he who when he sees that no further certainty is attainable, promptly decides on the most probable side, as if he were completely sure it was right. If we come to a parting of roads, and this one goes slightly east and the other a little west, then, if we believe that our town lies westward, we are bound, supposing we have no other guide, instantaneously to take the western road, although we know that the tracks thereabouts twist in every direction, and that the one to the west may bend southwards and bring us back to the point from which we started. + 

It is an old theory that our action depends on wisdom. We do what we see to be good. If we really see it to be good, we must do it. There is no doubt that a certain dimness of vision accompanies temptation. We do not discern in its real splendour the virtue which, properly discerned, would fascinate and compel us. But, nevertheless, the part which pure resolution has to play is very great. It is, as Burns says, the stalk of carle hemp in us. A man must continually put his back to the wall, just as in pain the hero determines through sheer force of will to endure. Inflexibility, Will, the power of holding fast to a principle is a primary faculty, not altogether to be resolved into insight, although of course it is easy enough to argue the identity of everything in man, and to prove that will is science, or love, or a superior capacity of definition, or anything else. We often fail through a lamentable trick of reopening negotiations with what we have determined to abandon. Severed once and for good reason, let it remain once and for all severed. + 

Principles are more useful to us in time of danger when they are presented to us incarnated in living men. We should ask ourselves, how would Paul or Jesus have acted in this case. That question will often settle a difficulty when the appeal to abstract principles would only bewilder us through the difficulty of selection. Furthermore, the reference to men rather than to abstractions puts us in good company: we are conscious of society and of fellowship: we see the faces of the heroes looking on us and encouraging us. Plutarch in his essay⁠—“How a Man May Perceive His Own Proceeding and Going Forward in Virtue” (Holland’s translation)⁠—says, “Hereupon also it followeth by good consequence that they who have once received so deep an impression in their hearts take this course with themselves, that when they begin any enterprise or enter into the administration of government, or when any sinister accident is presented to them, they set before their eyes the examples of those, who either presently are or heretofore have been worthy persons, discoursing in this manner: What is it that Plato would have done in this case? What would Epaminondas have said to this? How would Lycurgus or Agesilaus have behaved themselves herein? After this sort (I say) will they labour to frame, compose, reform, and adorn their manners, as it were, before a mirror or looking-glass; to wit, in correcting any unseemly speech that they have let fall, or repressing any passion that hath risen in them. They that have learned the names of the demigods called Idaei Dactyli know how to use them as counter charms, or preservatives against sudden frights, pronouncing the same one after another readily and ceremoniously; but the remembrance and thinking upon great and worthy men represented suddenly unto those who are in the way of perfection, and taking hold of them in all passions and complexions which shall encounter them, holdeth them up, and keepeth them upright that they cannot fall.” This we know is the secret of the Christian religion. It is based upon a Person, and the whole drift of Paul’s epistles is specially this⁠—to turn Christ into a second conscience. More particularly for simple people easily led away, but, indeed, for all people, the importance, the overwhelming importance of maintaining a personal basis for religion, cannot be overstated. I only speak my own experience: I am not talking theology or philosophy. I know what I am saying, and can point out the times and places when I should have fallen if I had been able to rely for guidance upon nothing better than a commandment or a deduction. But the pure, calm, heroic image of Jesus confronted me, and I succeeded. I had no doubt as to what He would have done, and through Him I did not doubt what I ought to do. + 