. Slowly these laws mature manhood. When
ideas are thrust into raw iron, the iron becomes a loom or an engine.
Thus when God's laws are incarnated in a babe, the child is changed
into the likeness of a citizen, a sage or seer. Nature, with her laws,
is not only the earliest, but also the most powerful, of life's
instructors.

Temptation is another teacher. Protection gives innocence, but
practice gives virtue. For ship timber we pass by the sheltered
hothouse, seeking the oak on the storm-swept hills. In that beautiful
story of the lost paradise, God pulls down the hedge built around Adam
and Eve. The government through a fence outside was succeeded by
self-government inside. The hermit and the cloistered saint end their
career with innocence. But Christ, struggling unto blood against sin,
ends His career with character. God educates man by giving him
complete charge over himself and setting him on "the barebacked horse
of his own will," leaving him to break it by his own strength.
Travelers to Alaska tell us that the wild berries attain a sweetness
there of which our temperate clime knows nothing. Scientists say that
the glowworm keeps its enemies at bay by the brightness of its own
light. Man, by his love of truth and right, becomes his own castle and
fortress. Cities no longer depend upon night-watchmen to guard against
marauders and burglars. Once men trusted to safes and iron bars upon
the windows. Now bankers ask electric lights to guard their treasure
vaults.

For centuries Spain's paternal laws have compelled each Spaniard to
ask his church what to think and believe. This method has robbed that
people of enduring and self-reliant manhood, and made them a race of
weaklings. For over-protection is a peril. Strength comes by
wrestling, knowledge by observing, wisdom by thinking, and character
by enduring and struggling. Exposure is often good fortune. Every
Luther and Cromwell has been tempted and tempered against the day of
danger and battle. As the victorious Old Guard were honored in
proportion to the number and severity of the wars through which they
had passed, so the temptations that seek man's destruction, when
conquered, cover him with glory. Ruskin notes that the art epochs have
also been epochs of war, upheaval, and tyranny. He accounts for this
by saying that when tyranny was hardest, crime blackest, sin ugliest,
then, in the recoil and conflict, beauty and heroism attained their
highest development.