Very closely connected with the stern self-denial and the manly strength of character so conspicuous in the first Christians was their moral courage. It requires very little knowledge of the world and experience of life to be made aware, in the case of those who are capable of being made aware of these things, that the general habitude of the world is not moral courage, but moral cowardice. The majority of men, like the majority of dogs I presume, are not physical cowards; the dog is naturally a fighting animal, and so is man. But that the majority of men are moral cowards is certain. No consideration is so powerful with schoolboys as that of being laughed at for any singularity in dress or appearance; the slavery of {218} fashion among grown-up persons is founded partly on the same dread; and the fear of standing in a minority restrains many a man in public life from giving voice to a salutary truth, and planting a gag on the barking mouth of popular error. I have myself been present at meetings of corporate bodies, where I gave my suffrage, confident that I was right in acting consistently on a plain principle of common honesty; and after the vote was taken I was told confidentially by some of those who had voted against my views, that they had a strong conviction I was in the right, only they could not venture to vote with me in the face of such an overwhelming majority! This is the moral courage of the world. ‘Have any of the Scribes and Pharisees believed in him? If so, we will speak out; if not, we keep silence.’ This tendency to follow authority is in many persons, no doubt, the necessary consequence of their own ignorance; ignorance is always afraid, and it knows by a sure instinct that its only safety lies in being led by superior knowledge. This no one can blame. But when a man acts against his own conviction in giving his vote as a member of a corporate body, or in a political assembly, to shield himself from the indignation or to gain the favour of an unreasonable multitude,--when, as in pure democracy, the question of right and wrong never comes before a man at all, but the one rule of political life simply is to submit to what such and such a local majority may choose to dictate,--this is sheer cowardice and simple slavery, from which a man of honourable and independent mind, not tainted with the baseness of democratic life, must shrink with abhorrence. And so in fact we do find that in democratic countries, where all {219} things are controlled by political cliques, who dictate the local policy, to which the puppet called a Member of Parliament, or a Deputy, is expected to swear, men of independent spirit, manly courage, and large intelligence are found systematically to shrink from the arena. How different from this demoralizing miasma is the atmosphere which we breathe in the New Testament! There a single manly individual stands forward, and in the name of God