the characterlessness which often
goes with being poor. Let him insist on respecting the condition where
he lives. Let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he grows
rich, he shall go out of the low door of the old familiar poverty with a
true pang of regret, and with a true honor for the narrow home in which
he has lived so long."[S]

[S] Sermons. 5th Series, New York, 1893, pp. 166, 167.

The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer's life consist
in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner springs. The
backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently endured--for what?
To gain a quid of tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and
a bed, and to begin again the next day and shirk as much as one can.
This really is why we raise no monument to the laborers in the Subway,
even though they be our conscripts, and even though after a fashion our
city is indeed based upon their patient hearts and enduring backs and
shoulders. And this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose
outward conditions were even brutaller still. The soldiers are supposed
to have followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed to have
followed none.

You see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; and how strangely the
complexities of this wonderful human nature of ours begin to develop
under our hands. We have seen the blindness and deadness to each other
which are our natural inheritance; and, in spite of them, we have been
led to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth show, and which may be
present in the lives of others where we least descry it. And now we are
led to say that such inner meaning can be _complete_ and _valid for us
also_, only when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with
an ideal.

* * * * *

But what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal? Can we give no definite
account of such a word?

To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for instance, must be something
intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if
we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and
brightness that go with all intellectual facts. Secondly, there must be
_novelty_ in an ideal,--novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps.
Sodden routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden
routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another. This shows that
there is nothing absolutely ideal: ideals are r