God), guide and command us in
the path of duty. He saw life very simple; he did not love refinements;
he was a friend to much conformity in unessentials. For (he would argue)
it is in this life, as it stands about us, that we are given our
problem; the manners of the day are the colours of our palette; they
condition, they constrain us; and a man must be very sure he is in the
right, must (in a favourite phrase of his) be "either very wise or very
vain," to break with any general consent in ethics. I remember taking
his advice upon some point of conduct. "Now," he said, "how do you
suppose Christ would have advised you?" and when I had answered that He
would not have counselled me anything unkind or cowardly, "No," he said,
with one of his shrewd strokes at the weakness of his hearer, "nor
anything amusing." Later in life, he made less certain in the field of
ethics. "The old story of the knowledge of good and evil is a very true
one," I find him writing; only (he goes on) "the effect of the original
dose is much worn out, leaving Adam's descendants with the knowledge
that there is such a thing--but uncertain where." His growing sense of
this ambiguity made him less swift to condemn, but no less stimulating
in counsel. "You grant yourself certain freedoms. Very well," he would
say, "I want to see you pay for them some other way. You positively
cannot do this: then there positively must be something else that you
can do, and I want to see you find that out and do it." Fleeming would
never suffer you to think that you were living, if there were not,
somewhere in your life, some touch of heroism, to do or to endure.

This was his rarest quality. Far on in middle age, when men begin to lie
down with the bestial goddesses, Comfort and Respectability, the strings
of his nature still sounded as high a note as a young man's. He loved
the harsh voice of duty like a call to battle. He loved courage,
enterprise, brave natures, a brave word, an ugly virtue; everything that
lifts us above the table where we eat or the bed we sleep upon. This
with no touch of the motive-monger or the ascetic. He loved his virtues
to be practical, his heroes to be great eaters of beef; he loved the
jovial Heracles, loved the astute Odysseus; not the Robespierres and
Wesleys. A fine buoyant sense of life and of man's unequal character ran
through all his thoughts. He could not tolerate the spirit of the
pickthank; being what we are, he wished us to see