I doubt not there were times when Grant's voice did not possess the mellow and refined quality of the drawing-room exquisite, but he won victories and made a united people possible. John Brown was rude, rough, uncouth, boorish, when compared with the refined and polished cavaliers of the South. They called him a bandit, an invader, a revolutionist, an anarchist, and they captured and hanged him, but to thousands of men his crazy dream of the invasion of the South to forcibly compel the freedom of the slave is being more and more seen by hundreds of thousands of wise men to have been one of the most practical and effective means of calling the attention of men to the moral principle involved in the question of slavery, as to whether men of one color of blood or skin had the right to hold in bondage men of a different color. When Theodore Parker was denouncing the iniquities of any and all slavery, his voice was not as soft and gentle and sweetly modulated as that of Longfellow, yet it played as important a part in the history of the development of mankind and stirred men to higher endeavor on the part of their suffering and down-trodden fellows. What, then, is the upshot of the whole matter? It seems to me it is this: Listen to the voice that appeals to your own soul; that lifts you from the lower to the higher; that thrills you to deeds of heroism, that stimulates you to acts of nobleness, that calls you to a life of helpful self-sacrifice; and while doing this, cease to criticise, to find fault, to censure the kind of voice to which you do not care to listen. The strong, vigorous, robust, red-blooded man of the out-of-doors generally will not speak nor act with the perfect restraint and conventionality of the man born in the atmosphere of the drawing-room, but his message may be just as helpful to the world, and as divinely inspired as that of his more refined and dignified prototype. CHAPTER XXII ABSORPTION IN RELATION TO RADIATION Most important factors in Living the Radiant Life are Living the Life of _Possession_ and Living the Absorptive Life. To radiate one must possess, and to possess one must absorb. To give largely and well, one must receive largely and well. The Absorptive Life is as essential as the Radiant Life. Out in the great silences are the eloquent voices of God ready to speak to the attentive soul; out in Nature a million voices are ready to impart knowledge to the ignorant. All one has to do to receive is to "ask"; not with the voice but with the whole being. As a sponge absorbs water up to the limit of its capacity, so should man absorb, and then, unlike the sponge, which must be squeezed from without ere it will give off that which it has received, man should radiate from within all that he has received.