sisting
temptation to break them. What are we to do with the rest of it? Or
suppose them (and this is a high step indeed) resolved into love of God
and love of our neighbour. Suppose we know that it is our duty to love
our neighbour as ourselves. What are we to do, then, for our neighbour,
besides abstaining from doing him injury? The saints knew very well what
_they_ were to do; but our duties, we suppose, lie in a different
direction; and it does not appear that we have found them. 'We have
duties so positive to our neighbour,' says Bishop Butler, 'that if we
give more of our time and of our attention to ourselves and our own
matters than is our just due, we are taking what is not ours, and are
guilty of fraud.' What does Bishop Butler mean? It is easy to answer
generally. In detail, it is not only difficult, it is impossible to
answer at all. The modern world says--'Mind your own business, and leave
others to take care of theirs;' and whoever among us aspires to more
than the negative abstaining from wrong, is left to his own guidance.
There is no help for him, no instruction, no modern ideal which shall be
to him what the heroes were to the young Greek or Roman, or the martyrs
to the middle age Christian. There is neither track nor footprint in the
course which he will have to follow, while, as in the old fairy tale,
the hillside which he is climbing is strewed with black stones mocking
at him with their thousand voices. We have no moral criterion, no idea,
no counsels of perfection; and surely this is the reason why education
is so little prosperous with us; because the only education worth
anything is the education of character, and we cannot educate a
character unless we have some notion of what we would form. Young men,
as we know, are more easily led than driven. It is a very old story that
to forbid this and that (so curious and contradictory is our nature) is
to stimulate a desire to do it. But place before a boy a figure of a
noble man; let the circumstances in which he has earned his claim to be
called noble be such as the boy himself sees round himself; let him see
this man rising over his temptation, and following life victoriously and
beautifully forward, and, depend on it, you will kindle his heart as no
threat of punishment here or anywhere will kindle it.

People complain of the sameness in the 'Lives of the Saints.' It is that
very sameness which is the secret of their excellence. There is a
sameness