The last
trial of the virtues of the Patent Redintegrator by the Special Committee
of the Tract Society has ended like all the rest, and as all attempts to
buy peace at too dear a rate must end. Peace is an excellent thing, but
principle and pluck are better; and the man who sacrifices them to gain it
finds at last that he has crouched under the Caudine yoke to purchase only
a contemptuous toleration that leaves him at war with his own self-respect
and the invincible forces of his higher nature.
But the peace which Christ promised to his followers was not of this
world; the good gift he brought them was not peace, but a sword. It was no
sword of territorial conquest, but that flaming blade of conscience and
self-conviction which lightened between our first parents and their lost
Eden,--that sword of the Spirit that searcheth all things,--which severs
one by one the ties of passion, of interest, of self-pride, that bind the
soul to earth,--whose implacable edge may divide a man from family, from
friends, from whatever is nearest and dearest,--and which hovers before
him like the air-drawn dagger of Macbeth, beckoning him, not to crime, but
to the legitimate royalties of self-denial and self-sacrifice, to the
freedom which is won only by surrender of the will. Christianity has never
been concession, never peace; it is continual aggression; one province of
wrong conquered, its pioneers are already in the heart of another.
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