It is a fallacy to suppose that manners are matters merely of social life; they belong to a man’s whole life—his public as well as his private life. They have infinitely more to do with the success of public men than is usually supposed. They affect especially and profoundly the pastoral character and success. It is a great thing to be a true evangelist; but can you be completely so without obedience to the injunction of one who was more than an evangelist, who was an apostle—“Be courteous?” A public man who outrages good manners may not be altogether a moral nuisance, but he can not well be a salutary moral power in the community. His best theoretical instruction, if he be a public teacher, may not compensate for the continuous, insidious, demoralizing influence of his manners on his habitual hearers, especially on the incipient character of children and youth. The public teacher should, above all things, be, as Cicero insisted in regard to the orator, a good man; but, next to this, he should be a genuine gentleman. This phrase ordinarily has a somewhat ambiguous application: we need not say that we are not using it in its equivocal, conventional sense. We use it in the sense of the apostle’s command—“Be courteous,”—maintain your manners, he would say. Gentleness, so incessantly enjoined in holy Scripture, is an equivalent phrase—because genuine politeness itself always includes, as its central element, gentleness (gentility), kindliness; that is to say, a certain moral sentiment of tenderness and goodwill toward all men. It is a fact, worthy of the attention of the ethical philosopher, that true manners, genuine politeness, in not only polished life, but even in the chivalry of the age of knighthood, has thus been identified with a certain moral sentiment; that “gentility” essentially means gentleness; that even the chivalry, the bravery, of the hero, has proverbially been associated with generosity. How can a public man, then, dispense with these qualities? There is not merely a conciliatory influence in good manners on the part of the public man—an influence to win a candid hearing—but there is a positive moral power in them, a power which enhances all other power.