Living the Radiant Life: A Personal NarrativeJames, George Wharton
Religion
Living the Radiant Life: A Personal Narrative
James, George Wharton
Conduct of life
When Russia declared war against Japan, Tolstoi wrote a letter to the
Emperor, the state officials, and the Russian people that was a loud
trumpet blast heard throughout the world calling upon them in the name
of their Creator and down-trodden humanity to stop! and declare peace.
Many a man had been sent to Siberia for life--nay, sent to be speedily
tortured to death--for far less than this, but this fearless old man let
his voice ring out with a power that convinced thousands as never before
that war at its best was but a relic of barbarism and a disgrace to
every professedly progressive nation.
Oh, for a courage like Tolstoi's--true-hearted, brave, simple-minded,
pure, that never failed when called upon. Granted he was "queer,"
"quixotic," "unbalanced," "impracticable," was not his queerness and
impracticability at least on the side of the moral forces of the world?
Everybody knew where and how he stood; where his sympathies were; and
his life has strengthened the backbone and put new vigor into the weak
knees of hundreds of thousands, for moral courage radiates with power
that increases according to the square of the distance. It does not grow
less; it enlarges; for each man who feels it becomes a new generator and
transformer and thus enlarges and increases its radiating power four-,
eight-, twelve-fold.
Henry Bergh was another of these heroic moral-courage radiators. His
tender heart was cut to the quick day by day by seeing the cruelties
perpetrated upon the poor dumb brutes of the city of New York. He
determined to do what he could to stop these barbarous practices. He
agitated and wrote, spoke and interviewed until he succeeded in getting
ordinances and acts passed which gave him power to prevent whatever
cruelties he saw. How he was jeered; how he was cursed, when he sought
to interfere with a brutal driver who would cruelly whip his horses to
compel them to drag loads beyond their strength! The newspapers said he
stood in the way of business, and they sarcastically called him "the
knight of the doleful countenance," not realizing that it was the
cruelties perpetrated by so-called men upon their younger brothers--the
dumb animals--that had so frozen the pain and anguish of his heart upon
his face. But his heart never failed, his courage never wavered.
Threatened, mobbed, his life often in peril, he fearlessly waged
constant warfare against cruelty, and to-day the very city that hated
and scorned him is building monuments to his honor in every
street-watering trough they erect. And his radiant influence has reached
every civilized city _in the world_, such is the penetrating radiancy of
a loving and true heart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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