I came among
you to bring warmth to your loneliness; I brought your shivering souls
together in a flock, and bound your scattered weakness in sheaves of
arrows. I am brotherly love, the great Communion; and you destroy your
fellows in my name, fools that you are!..._
_For ages I have toiled to deliver you from the chains of bestiality,
to free you from your hard egotism. On the road of Time you advance
by toil and sweat; provinces and nations are the military milestones
which mark your resting-places. Your weakness alone created them.
Before I can lead you farther, I must wait till you have taken breath;
you have so little strength of lungs or heart, that you have made
virtues of your weaknesses. You admire your heroes for the distance
they went before they dropped exhausted; not because they were the
first to reach those limits. And when you have come without difficulty
to the spot where these forerunners stopped, you think yourselves
heroes in your turn_.
_What have these shadows of the past to do with us today? Bayard, Joan
of Arc, we have no further need of heroism like theirs, knights and
martyrs of a dead cause. We want apostles of the future, great hearts
that will give themselves for a larger country, a higher ideal.
Forward then; cross the old frontiers, and if you must still use these
crutches, to help your lameness, thrust the barriers back to the doors
of the East, the confines of Europe, until at last step by step you
reach the end, and men encircle the globe, each holding by the other's
hand.
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