old Samson, too, yes, heaven bless him,
and Moses and Samuel, the prophets, then we are reading it to some purpose.
Until you know them all as your best friends, you have not begun to read
that book; for that is what it was intended for. The Bible is an advanced
text book of biology, the science of life. If you will train your boys and
girls to walk the streets and live with the heroes of the world, make them
form an intimate friendship with them, then you have trained those boys and
girls to be heroes themselves.

Did you ever try reading to them the defense which old Socrates makes,
which Plato wrote down for us? I do not know whether Socrates ever said it,
but it was worthy of him. Read it to your boys and girls some day. See what
they say about the Apology. And read the Crito. Let them sit with Socrates
in his prison there on the hillside and listen to his discussion, until, as
he says, he hears the voice of the law ringing in his ears and he cannot
hear anything else, and stays on to die. When the prison door is opened for
him to walk out, provided he would walk out with dishonor, he will not go.
Let them see the old hero die in Athens as the sun goes down. You have not
only awakened a new interest, you have evoked a higher life, and that is
what we are after, that is what you and I are here for, that is the only
way in the end to beat the record. That is the essential power of great
leaders, of great prophets, and of great teachers, and the seat of it is in
their personality.

I don't know what I am talking about there either, for personality defies
analysis and it defies resistance. It leaps from soul to soul just like an
infection. We hear a great deal about the infectiousness of bad things and
people are always talking about infectious disease and of corrupting
influences in the world and all that sort of thing. Do you suppose the Lord
has made this world so that everything that is bad is contagious and
everything that is good is not contagious? Are you going to slander the
Lord like that? It is about time that we wake up to the fact that the real
genuine article of goodness is a good deal more contagious than smallpox.

Heroism and hero-worship is the central thought of history from the time of
Gideon to the time of Sheridan, and down to our present time. Virtue, we
must remember, should strike just like electricity from a dynamo. You
remember that was the continual word of that Great Master of ours. Someone