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
“Soul, rule thyself. On passion, deed, desire,
Lay thou the law of thy deliberate will.
Stand at thy chosen post, faith’s sentinel.
Learn to endure. Thine the reward
Of those who make living light their Lord.
Clad with celestial steel these stand secure,
Masters, not slaves.”
And if such self-control goes as far even as the self-extinction of
that voluntarily accepted Cross, on the green hill outside Jerusalem,
even so it will bring victory at the last, because it has brought
one long succession of victories over self all the days. I cut this
fugitive bit of verse from a newspaper the other day:
“Pausing a moment ere the day was done,
While yet the earth was scintillant with light,
I backward glanced. From valley, plain and height,
At intervals, where my life path had run,
Rose cross on cross: and nailed upon each one
Was my dead self. And yet that gruesome sight
Lent sudden splendour to the falling night.
Showing the conquests that my soul had won.
“Up to the rising stars I looked and cried,
There is no death! For year on year reborn,
I wake to larger life, to joy more great.
So many times have I been crucified,
So often seen the resurrection morn,
I go triumphant, though new Calvaries wait.”
And this freedom and victory are waiting only for those lives that have
been broken beneath the cross of an absolute restraint of God, and
have so mastered themselves under God’s name by the help of Christ that
control has been given over in trust into their own hands.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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