The World's Great Sermons, Volume 06: H. W. Beecher to Punshon
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 06: H. W. Beecher to Punshon
Sermons
All development, then, is from the animal toward the spiritual and
the invisible. This is the public sentiment of mankind even in the
lower forms of society. What are considered heroic traits, the
things which bring admiration to men, if narrowly examined will
be found to be not the things which belong to men as brutes--tho
these things may be employed by them as instruments. Even in the
cases of such men as Samson and Hercules, who were rude, brute
men, it was not their strength that drew admiration to them: it
was their heroism; it was their patriotism; it was that which they
did by their strength for their kind, and not for themselves. And
in lower societies it is courage, it is self-devotion, it is the
want of fear, it is the higher form of animal life, that attracts
admiration. But as we develop out of barbarous into civilized
conditions, we admire men, not because they can lift so much,
or throw such heavy weights, or endure such hardships of body.
Admiration on these accounts has its place; but higher than these is
the power of thought, the power of planning, the power of executing,
the power of living at one point so as to comprehend in the effects
produced all circuits of time in the future. Thought-power;
emotion; moral sense; justice; equity in all its forms; higher
manhood, and its branches, which stretch up into the atmosphere
and reach nearest to the sun--these are something other than those
qualities which develop earliest, and are lowest--nearest to the
ground.
True manhood, then, has its ripeness in the higher faculties.
Without disdaining the companionship of the body the manhood of man
grows away from it--in another direction. There is not simply the
ripening of the physical that is in man; but there is, by means of
the physical, the ripening of the intellectual, the emotional, the
moral, the esthetic life, as well as the whole spiritual nature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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