Books of the inner life praise and enjoin lowliness, contrition, repentance, self-abnegation; but it is apparent to all thoughtful readers that the sort of humility inculcated is quite consistent with the self-reverence of Goethe or the self-reliance of Emerson—comes, indeed, to much the same thing. The “Imitatio Christi” is the type of such teaching, yet it is a manly book, and the earlier part especially contains exhortations to self-trust worthy of Emerson. “Certa viriliter,” the writer says, “consuetudo consuetudine vincitur. Si tu scis homines dimittere, ipsi bene te dimittent tua facta facere.”[61] The yielding constantly enjoined is either to God—that is, to an ideal personality developed in one’s own mind—or, if to men, it is a submission to external rule which is designed to leave the will free for what are regarded as its higher functions. The whole teaching tends to the aggrandizement of an ideal but intensely private self, worked out in solitary meditation—to insure which worldly ambition is to be renounced—and symbolized as God, conscience, or grace. The just criticism of the doctrine that Thomas stands for is not that it depreciates manhood and self-reliance, but that it calls these away from the worldly activities where they are so much needed, and exercises them in a region of abstract imagination. No healthy mind can cast out self-assertion and the idea of personal freedom, however the form of expression may seem to deny these things, and accordingly the Imitation, and still more the New Testament, are full of them. Where there is no self-feeling, no ambition of any sort, there is no efficacy or significance. To lose the sense of a separate, productive, resisting self, would be to melt and merge and cease to be. Healthy, balanced minds, of only medium sensibility, in a congenial environment and occupied with wholesome activity, keep the middle road of self-respect and reasonable ambition. They may require no special effort, no conscious struggle with recalcitrant egotism, to avoid heart-burning, jealousy, arrogance, anxious running after approval, and other maladies of the social self. With enough self-feeling to stimulate and not enough to torment him, with a social circle appreciative but not flattering, with good health and moderate success, a man may go through life with very little use for the moral and religious weapons that have been wrought for the repression of a contumacious self. There are many, particularly in an active, hopeful, and materially prosperous time like this, who have little experience of inner conflict and no interest in the literature and doctrine that relate to it.