rous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified.
LOWELL.

Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt.
SHAKESPEARE.

After the great inward struggle was over, and he had determined to
remain loyal to his principles, Thomas More walked cheerfully to the
block. His wife called him a fool for staying in a dark, damp, filthy
prison when he might have his liberty by merely renouncing his
doctrines, as some of the bishops had done. But he preferred death to
dishonor. His daughter allowed the power of love to drive away fear.
She remained true to her father when all others, even her mother, had
forsaken him. After his head had been cut off and exhibited on a pole
on London Bridge, the poor girl begged it of the authorities, and
requested that it be buried in the coffin with her. Her request was
granted, for her death occurred soon.

When Sir Walter Raleigh came to the scaffold he was very faint, and
began his speech to the crowd by saying that during the last two days
he had been visited by two ague fits. "If, therefore, you perceive any
weakness in me, I beseech you ascribe it to my sickness rather than to
myself." He took the axe and kissed the blade, and said to the
sheriff: "'T is a sharp medicine, but a sound cure for all diseases."

Don't waste time dreaming of obstacles you may never encounter, or in
crossing bridges you have not reached. Don't fool with a nettle!
Grasp with firmness if you would rob it of its sting. To half will and
to hang forever in the balance is to lose your grip on life.

Abraham Lincoln's boyhood was one long struggle with poverty, with
little education, and no influential friends. When at last he had
begun the practice of law, it required no little daring to cast his
fortune with the weaker side in politics, and thus imperil what small
reputation he had gained. Only the most sublime moral courage could
have sustained him as President to hold his ground against hostile
criticism and a long train of disaster; to issue the Emancipation
Proclamation; to support Grant and Stanton against the clamor of the
politicians and the press; and through it all to do the right as God
gave him to see the right.

Lincoln never shrank from espousing an unpopular cause when he believed
it to be right. At the time when it