The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American CharacterSpeer, Robert E. (Robert Elliott)
Philosophy
The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character
Speer, Robert E. (Robert Elliott)
Character; Christian life; Conduct of life; Moral education
Oddly enough my own thoughts that same day on which my friend was
writing this letter were exactly the opposite of his. He was thinking
of Jesus Christ as extinguished, he was thinking of all that He had
come to be and to do as gone, and he was trying to bring home to his
own heart what this utter loss of Christ would mean. I was meditating,
on the other hand, on that Saturday morning, on just the contrary idea.
On Good Friday, the day before this Saturday, there had been a great
Personality; now that Personality must be somewhere still. Personality
does not die. The next day, on Easter morning, there was to be a great
outburst of energy. That energy must be somewhere now. It will not be
created to-morrow morning. It must be somewhere to-day waiting to come
forth to-morrow. Where is it? And then I suddenly realized that it was
all there, that all that was to break loose Easter morning was shut
up inside that grave, that all the energies that were to peal across
the world on the new day were there asleep in that tomb that Saturday.
All the great love and power that had been had not been annihilated.
It was there somewhere, only out of sight for a little while. And the
great truth urged itself that all the dormant energies of life, all the
enshrouded and enfolded powers are here now and always just as truly as
they will be to-morrow when they awake, though for the hour they lie
latent and unused.
Then I began to see, as one’s thought ran easily on, that that Saturday
between Good Friday and Easter Day was in reality a sort of symbol of
the whole of history. For history, as we look back upon it, is full of
these repressions and these emergences, and then perhaps repressions
again, of great impulses and outbursts of energy and of power. Now and
then they are for good, as when the Reformation broke across men’s
minds, shattering their shackles, opening old prison doors, allowing
the enslaved human spirit to come out and breathe the air of freedom.
But why had it not come before? All the great energies of God that
burst forth in it must have been here even before that hour. And why
did they have to subside afterwards? They all _were_ still? Why might
they not have gone beating their way onward and not have ceased so soon?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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