other illustration of the power of the moral principle, is seen in
the sentiments with which we contemplate the character of confessors,
martyrs, and men of every age, who have sacrificed every thing else
for the sake of adherence to righteousness. The highest glory of human
nature is to love right better than life, and to obey the dictates of
conscience at every conceivable hazard. Even falsehood, when sealed with
blood, acquires not unfrequently, for a time, an irrepressible power.
Truth, when uttered from the stake, or on the scaffold, becomes
absolutely irresistible. We admire Plato, surrounded by listening
princes, and vieing with them in oriental magnificence; but we venerate
Socrates in his dungeon, patiently suffering death for holding forth the
truth; and the dictates of our own bosoms spontaneously assign to him
the highest place among the uninspired teachers of wisdom. Or, to turn
to more awful examples, the foundations of the Christian religion were
laid in blood. The Captain of our salvation "was obedient unto death,
the death of the cross." The martyrdoms of the early age of the church
gave to the world examples of the love of right, of which it had never
before conceived even the possibility, and thus set on foot a moral
reformation, which is destined to work in the character of man a
universal transformation.

* * * * *

=_Horace Mann, 1796-1859._= (Manual, p. 532.)

From "Lectures on various Subjects."

=_158._= THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN.

In this country most young men are poor. Time is the rock from which
they are to hew out their fortunes; and health, enterprise, and
integrity, the instruments with which to do it. For this, diligence in
business, abstinence from pleasures, privation even, of everything that
does not endanger health, are to be joyfully welcomed and borne. When we
look around us, and see how much of the wickedness of the world
springs from poverty, it seems to sanctify all honest efforts for the
acquisition of an independence; but when an independence is acquired,
then comes the moral crisis, then comes an Ithuriel test, which shows
whether a man is higher than a common man, or lower than a common
reptile. In the duty of accumulation--and I call it a _duty_, in the most
strict and literal signification of that word--all below a competence
is most valuable, and its acquisition most laudable; but all above a
fortune is a misfortune. It is a misfortune