evil tempers, ashamed of their
worldliness, ashamed of their trivial, futile past. The first condition
of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to
reverence. And this latter precious gift was brought to Milby by Mr.
Tryan and Evangelicalism.

Yes, the movement was good, though it had that mixture of folly and evil
which often makes what is good an offence to feeble and fastidious minds,
who want human actions and characters riddled through the sieve of their
own ideas, before they can accord their sympathy or admiration. Such
minds, I daresay, would have found Mr. Tryan's character very much in
need of that riddling process. The blessed work of helping the world
forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men; and I should
imagine that neither Luther nor John Bunyan, for example, would have
satisfied the modern demand for an ideal hero, who believes nothing but
what is true, feels nothing but what is exalted, and does nothing but
what is graceful. The real heroes, of God's making, are quite different:
they have their natural heritage of love and conscience which they drew
in with their mother's milk; they know one or two of those deep spiritual
truths which are only to be won by long wrestling with their own sins and
their own sorrows; they have earned faith and strength so far as they
have done genuine work; but the rest is dry barren theory, blank
prejudice, vague hearsay. Their insight is blended with mere opinion;
their sympathy is perhaps confined in narrow conduits of doctrine,
instead of flowing forth with the freedom of a stream that blesses every
weed in its course; obstinacy or self-assertion will often interfuse
itself with their grandest impulses; and their very deeds of
self-sacrifice are sometimes only the rebound of a passionate egoism. So
it was with Mr. Tryan: and any one looking at him with the bird's-eye
glance of a critic might perhaps say that he made the mistake of
identifying Christianity with a too narrow doctrinal system; that he saw
God's work too exclusively in antagonism to the world, the flesh, and the
devil; that his intellectual culture was too limited--and so on; making
Mr. Tryan the text for a wise discourse on the characteristics of the
Evangelical school in his day.

But I am not poised at that lofty height. I am on the level and in the
press with him, as he struggles his way along the stony road, through the
crowd of unloving fellow-men. He is stumbling,