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IMMORTALITY AND JOY
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dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life... ... ... ...Hero worship endures for ever while man endures. Boswell venerates his Johnson, right truly even in the eighteenth century. The unbelieving French believe in their Voltaire; and burst out round him into very curious Hero-worship in that last act of his life when they stifle him under roses ............At Paris his carriage is the nucleus of a comet, whose train fills whole streets. The ladies pluck a hair or two from his fur, to keep it as a sacred relic.. There was nothing highest, beautifullest, noblest in all France that did not feel
be higher, beautifuller, nobler............. It will ever be so. We all love great men; love, venerate and bow down submissive before great men; nay can we honestly bow down to anything else? Ah, does not every true man feci that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him? No nobler or more blessed feeling dwells in man's heart. And to me it is very cheering to consider that no sceptical logic, or general triviality, insincerity and aridity of any time and its influences can destroy this noble in-born loyalty and worship that is in man............. It is an eternal corner-stone from which they can begin to build themselves up......... That man, in some sense or other, worships heroes, that we all of us reverence and must ever reverence Great Men, this is to me, the living rock amid all rushings down whatsoever."
The italics are mine, and they speak for themselves. Even to-day men and women assemble, in thousands, in Trafalgar Square in London to do honour to a statue of stone that stands there ; they illuminate the whole neighbourhood ; they place garlands of flowers on the object of their adoration. Is it idolatry they practise ? Are they idolators ? No, no, such a thing is simply impossible ; no one can accuse the English of idolatry! It is not worshipping the block of stone; they ask nothing from it: they offer it no food, nor do they pray to it. If you look more closely into their 'statue worship you will find it to be the adoration of a something of which the figure is a symbol. It is not the statue of Nelson they assemble to worship, but the spirit of the brave man, the fearless sailor, who made England what she is to-day--the acknowledged Queen of the Seas. The English are a nation of sailors : take away their seapower, and they are gone. But for the glorious achievements of the British Navy, England would have been overrun by Germany today. The English know it, and pour forth, spontaneously, almost unconsciously, the warmest devotion of their free hearts on the one being who saved them from utter ruin in the past. But if Nelson
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