y from the example of that Antigone who died rather
than desert the body of her dead brother, as that each modern youth
beholds self-sacrifice standing forth clothed with immeasurable
excellence.

Not large the company of the Immortals whose birthdays society
celebrates. Yet when on these high days, through song or story the
poet or orator draws back the veil and reveals to the assembled
multitude the face of some Garibaldi or Hampden or Lincoln, the beloved
one is seen to be clothed with genius and beauty and truth indeed, but
also to be crowned with self-sacrifice. Society makes haste to forget
him who remembers only himself. As there can be no illiterate sage, no
ignorant Shakespeare, so history knows no selfish hero. For the
mercenary forehead memory has no wreath. A sentinel with a flaming
sword guards the threshold of the temple of fame against those
aspirants named Ease, Avarice, Self-indulgence.

"Shall I be remembered by posterity?" asked the dying Garfield. In
this eager, tremulous question the renowned and the obscure alike have
a pathetic interest. For the deeply reflective mind oblivion is a
thought all unendurable. The tool man fashions, the structure he
rears, the success he achieves, not less than his marble monument,
looks down upon the beholder with a mute appeal for recollection. To
each eager aspirant for everlasting remembrance Christ comes whispering
his secret of abiding renown. Speaking not as an amateur, but as a
master, Christ affirms that he who would save his life must lose it,
that he who would be remembered by others must forget himself, that the
soldier who flees from danger to save his body shall leave that life
upon the battlefield, while he who plunges his banner into the very
thick of the fight and is carried off the field upon his shield shall
in safety bear his life away. Hard seem the terms; they rebuke ease,
they smite self-indulgence, they deny the maxims of the worldly wise.
But in accepting Christ's principle and forsaking their palaces that
they might be as brothers to beggars, Xavier and Loyola found an
exhilaration denied to kings; while each Sir Launfal, in his ease
denied the Holy Grail, has in the hour of self-sacrifice discerned the
Vision Splendid. To each young patriot and soldier looking eagerly
unto the tablets that commemorate the deeds of heroes, to each young
scholar aspiring to a place beside the sages, comes this word: Life is
through death, and imm