Chapter 18

FORTITUDE; OR DUTIES WITH REFERENCE TO UNAVOIDABLE EVILS AND SUFFERINGS.

There are, in almost every prolonged human experience, *privations and sufferings to be endured, disappointments to be submitted to, obstacles and difficulties to be surmounted and overcome*. From whatever source these elements of experience proceed, even if from blind chance, or from _fate_ (which denotes the _utterance_ or decree of arbitrary and irresponsible power), the strong man will brace himself up to bear them; the wise man will shape his conduct by them; the man of lofty soul will rise above them. But the temper in which they will be borne, yielded to, or surmounted, must be contingent on the belief concerning them. If they are regarded as actual evils, they will probably be endured with sullenness, or submitted to with defiance and scorn, or surmounted with pride and self-inflation. Even in the writings of the later Stoics, which abound in edifying precepts of fortitude and courage under trial, there is an undertone of defiance, as if the sufferer were contending with a hostile force, and a constant tendency to extol and almost deify the energy of soul which the good man displays in fighting with a hard destiny. If, on the other hand, physical evils are regarded as wise and benign appointments of the Divine love and fatherhood, the spirit in which they are borne and struggled against is characterized by tenderness, meekness, humility, trust, and hope. It is instructive in this regard to read alternately the Stoics and St. Paul, and to contrast their magnanimous, but grim and stern resignation, with the jubilant tone in which, a hundred times over, and with a vast variety of gladsome utterance, he repeats the sentiment contained in those words, “As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” As ours is the Christian theory as to the (so-called) evils of human life, we shall recognize it in our treatment of the several virtues comprehended under the general title of Fortitude.

Section I.

Patience.(16)

*Patience* is incumbent on us, only under inevitable sufferings or hardships, or under such as are incurred in the discharge of manifest duty, or for the benefit of our fellow-men. Needless sufferings or privations we are bound to shun or to escape, not to bear. The caution and foresight by which they may be evaded hold an essential place among the duties of prudence. Nor does reason or religion sanction self-imposed burdens or hardships of any kind, whether in penance for wrong-doing, as a means of purchasing the Divine favor, or as a mode of spiritual discipline.

Patience implies *serenity, cheerfulness, and hopefulness*, under burdens and trials. It must be distinguished from apathy, which is a temperament, not a virtue. There are some persons whose sensibilities are so sluggish that they are incapable of keen suffering, and of profound and lasting sorrow. We can hardly call this a desirable temperament; for its capacity of enjoyment is equally defective, and, as there is more happiness than misery in almost every life, he whose susceptibility of both pain and pleasure is quick and strong is, on the whole, the gainer thereby. The serenity of patience requires vigorous self-command. It is essential, first of all, to control, and as far as possible to suppress, the outward tokens of pain and grief. They, like all modes of utterance, deepen the feeling they express; while a firm and self-contained bearing enhances the fortitude which it indicates. Control must also be exercised over the thoughts, that they be abstracted from the painful experience, and employed on themes that will fill and task them. Mental industry is the best relief that mere philosophy has for pain and sorrow; and though it certainly is not a cure, it never fails to be of service as a palliative. Even when bodily distress or infirmity renders continuous thought impossible, the effort of recollection, or the employment of the mind in matters too trivial for its exercise in health, may relieve the weariness and lighten the stress of suffering. Nor let devices of this sort be deemed unworthy of a place even among duties; for they are often essential means to ends of high importance. They assert and maintain the rightful supremacy of the mind over the body; they supersede that morbid brooding upon painful experiences which generates either melancholy or querulousness; and they leave in the moral nature an unobstructed entrance to all soothing and elevating influences.

*Cheerfulness* in the endurance of pain and hardship must result in great part from the belief. If I regard myself as irresistibly subject to an automatic Nature, whose wheels may bruise or crush me at any moment, I know not why or how I could be cheerful, even in such precarious health or prosperity as might fall to my lot; and there could certainly be no reassuring aspect to my adverse fortune. But if I believe that under a fatherly Providence there can be no suffering without its ministry of mercy, no loss without its greater gain within my reach and endeavor, no hardship without its reflex benefit in inward growth and energy, then I can take and bear the inevitable burdens of this earthly life in the same spirit in which I often assume burdens not imposed upon me from without, for the more than preponderant benefit which I hope to derive from them. But if I have this faith in a benignant Providence which will not afflict me uselessly, I am under obligation not to let my faith, if real, remain inactive in my seasons of pain, loss, or grief. I am bound so to ponder on my assured belief, and on such proofs of it as may lie in my past experience, that it shall give its hue to my condition, its tone to my thought, its direction to the whole current of my sentiment and feeling. Thus may endurance be not only calm, but cheerful, because pervaded by the conviction that at the heart of all that seems evil there is substantial good.

Yet, it cannot be denied that there are life-long burdens and griefs,—incurable illnesses, irretrievable losses, bereavements that will never cease to be felt, and cannot be replaced. Especially in advanced years there are infirmities, disabilities, and privations, which cannot by any possibility have a resultant revenue equivalent to what they take from us; for in old age the growth of character is too slow to be worth the sacrifice which in earlier life may be more than compensated by the consciousness of spiritual enlargement and increase. How shall these burdens be borne cheerfully? They cannot, unless they be also borne hopefully. But if there be presented to the faith, beyond the earthly life, a future, the passage into which is to be made the easier by loss and sorrow here; if families are there to be reunited, and void places in the affections filled again; if worthy hopes, seemingly disappointed, are only postponed for a richer and happier fulfilment,—there is in that future exhaustless strength for solace and support under what must be endured here. Earthly trial must seem light and momentary in view of perfect and eternal happiness; and thus the hope that lays hold on an infinite domain of being is coined into utilities for the daily needs of the tried, suffering, afflicted, and age-bowed, supplying to patience an element without which it cannot be made perfect.

Section II.

Submission.

There are events, seemingly adverse, which in themselves are transient, and inflict no permanent discomfort, but which necessitate the surrender of cherished expectations, the change of favorite plans, it may be, the life-long abandonment of aims and hopes that had held the foremost place in the anticipated future. Here submission of some sort is a necessity. But the submission may be querulous and repining; it may be bitter and resentful; it may be stern and rigid. In the last of these types only can there be any semblance of virtue; and this last can be virtuous, only where inevitable events are attributed to Fate, and not to Providence. But if a wise and kind Providence presides over human affairs, its decrees are our directory. The very events which hedge in, mark out our way. The tree which has its upward growth checked spreads its branches; that which is circumscribed in its lateral expansion attains the greater height. The tendrils of the vine are guided by the very obstacles placed in its way. Thus, in human life, impassable barriers in one direction prescribe aims and endeavors in a different direction. The things that we cannot do determine the things that we ought to do. The growth which is impeded must give place to growth of a different type, and to us undoubtedly more wholesome, more congenial with our capacities, more conducive to our true well-being. What seem obstacles may be supports, giving the best possible direction to our active powers, and so training our desires and affections as to lead to higher happiness and more substantial good than could have otherwise been attained.

*Submission*, then, *must be grounded in faith*. The inevitable must be to us the appointment of Omniscient Love. In our childhood the very regimen and discipline that were least to our taste proceeded often from the wisest counsels, and in due time we acquiesced in them as judicious and kind, nor would we in the retrospect have had them otherwise. As little as we then knew what was best for our well-being in the nearer future, we may now know as to what is best for us in a remote future, whether in the present or in a higher state of being. All that remains for us is acquiescence, cheerful and hopeful, in a Wisdom that cannot err, in a Love which can will only the best of which we are capable.

*Submission* is not merely a passive, but equally *an active virtue*. Inevitable events impose imperative duties. In the direction which they indicate there is work for us, of self-culture, of kindness, of charity. Our characters can be developed, not by yielding, however cheerfully, to what seem misfortunes, but by availing ourselves of the opportunities which they present, in place of those of which they have deprived us. When the way we had first chosen is barred against us, we are not to lie still, but to move onward with added diligence on the way that is thus opened to us. If outward success is arrested and reverted, there is only the more reason for improving the staple of our inward being. If those dearest to us have passed beyond the reach of our good offices, there are the more remote that may be brought near, and made ours, by our beneficence. If our earthly life is rendered desolate, the affections, hopes, and aims thus unearthed may by our spiritual industry and thrift be trained heavenward. All this is included in full submission to the will of the Divine providence; for that will is not our loss, disappointment, or suffering, but our growth, by means of it, in quantity of mental and spiritual life, in capacity of duty, and in the power of usefulness.

Section III.

Courage.

Patience, as its name imports, is a passive quality; Submission blends the passive and the active; while *Courage* is preëminently an active virtue. Patience resigns itself to what must be endured; submission conforms itself to what it gladly would, but cannot reverse; courage resists what it cannot evade, surmounts what it cannot remove, and declines no conflict in which it is honorable to engage. It is obvious that the occasions for these virtues are widely different. Patience has its place where calm and cheerful endurance is the only resource; submission, where there must be voluntary self-adaptation to altered circumstances; courage, where there is threatened evil which strenuous effort can avert, mitigate, or subdue.

*Courage is a virtue, only when it is a necessity.* There is no merit in seeking danger, in exciting opposition, in courting hostility. Indeed, conduct of this description more frequently proceeds from persons who know themselves cowards and fear to be thought so, than from those who are actually possessed of courage. But there are perils, encounters, enmities, which cannot by any possibility be avoided, and there are others which can be avoided only by the sacrifice of principle, or by the surrender of opportunities for doing good, and which, therefore, to a virtuous man are inevitable.

The *physical courage*, commonly so called, which is prompt and fearless in the presence of imminent danger, or in armed conflict with enemies, may be, or may not be, a virtue. It may proceed from a mind too shallow and frivolous to appreciate the worth of life or the magnitude of the peril that threatens it; it may, as often in the case of veteran soldiers, be the result of discipline without the aid of principle; or it may depend wholly on intense and engrossing excitement, so that he who would march fearlessly at the head of a forlorn hope might quail before a solitary foe. But if one be, in the face of peril, at the same time calm and resolute, self-collected and firm, cautious and bold, fully aware of all that he must encounter and unfalteringly brave in meeting it, such courage is a high moral attainment. Its surest source is trust in the Divine providence,—the fixed conviction that the inevitable cannot be otherwise than of benignant purpose and ministry, though that purpose may be developed and that ministry effected only in a higher state of being. To this faith must be added a strong sense of one’s manhood, and of his superiority by virtue of that manhood over all external surroundings and events. We are conscious of a rightful supremacy over the outward world, and deem it unworthy to succumb, without internecine resistance, to any force by which we may be assailed, whether that force be a power of nature or a wrongful assault from a fellow-man. It is the presence of this consciousness that wins our admiration for all genuine heroism, and the absence of it at the moment of need that makes cowardice contemptible.

There is a *moral courage* required in pursuing our legitimate course in life, or in discharging our manifest duty, notwithstanding straitnesses, hindrances, obstacles, to which the feeble and timid could not but yield. The constituent elements of this type of courage are precisely the same that are needed in the encounter with physical peril. In both cases it is equally unmanly to succumb until we have resisted to the utmost. But while physical courage can at best only insure our safety, moral courage contributes essentially to the growth of mind and character; and the larger the opportunity for its exercise, the greater will be the mass of mind, the quantity of character, the power of duty and of usefulness. Straitnesses develop richer resources than they bar. Hindrances nurture hardihood of spirit in the struggle against them, or in the effort to neutralize them. Obstacles, when surmounted, give one a higher position than could be attained on an unobstructed path. The school of difficulty is that in which we have our most efficient training for eminence, whether of capacity or of moral excellence. What are accounted inevitable evils are, when met with courage, only benefits and blessings, inasmuch as they bring into full and vigorous exercise the hardier muscles and sinews of the inner man, to measure strength with them or to rise above them.

Courage is needed in *the profession and maintenance of the true and the right*, when denied, assailed, or vilipended. Communities never move abreast in the progress of opinion. There are always pioneer minds and consciences; and the men who are in advance of their time must encounter obloquy at least, often persecution, loss, hardship, sometimes legal penalties and disabilities. Under such circumstances, there are doubtless many more that inwardly acknowledge the unpopular truth or the contested right, than there are who are willing to avow and defend their belief. Many are frightened into false utterance or deceptive silence. But there must be in such minds a conscious mendacity, fatal to their own self-respect, and in the highest degree detrimental to their moral selfhood. It demands and at the same time nurtures true greatness of soul to withstand the current of general opinion, to defy popular prejudice, to make one’s self “of no reputation” in order to preserve his integrity unimpaired. Therefore is it that, in the lapse of time, the very men who have been held in the lowest esteem rise into eminence in the general regard, sometimes while they are still living, oftener with a succeeding generation. Martyrs in their day, they receive the crown of martyrdom when the work which they commenced is consummated. The history of all the great reforms which have been successive eras in the moral progress of Christendom is full of names, once dishonored, now among the foremost of their race.

This type of courage has, in less enlightened ages than our own, been made illustrious by *those who have sacrificed life rather than deny or suppress beliefs* which they deemed of vital moment. It can hardly be anticipated that the civilized world will recede so far into barbarism as to light again the death-flame of persecution; but it may be questioned whether the chronic sacrifice of all which men most desire in life requires or manifests less of heroism than in earlier times furnished victims for the arena or the stake.

In the moral hierarchy the first rank is probably due to *the courage that inspires and sustains arduous and perilous philanthropic enterprise*. The martyr for opinion suffers or dies rather than stain his soul with the positive guilt of falsehood; while the philanthropist might evade toil and danger without committing any actual sin, or making himself liable to censure or disapproval either from God or man. In the former case, hardship or danger is rendered inevitable by the felt necessity of self-respect; in the latter, by the urgency of a love for man equal or superior to the love for self. As examples of this highest type of courage, it may suffice to name Howard, whose labors for prison-reform were pursued at the well-known risk and the ultimate cost of his life; Florence Nightingale and the noble sisterhood inaugurated by her, who have won all the untarnished and undisputed laurels of recent wars on both sides of the Atlantic; and the Christian missionaries to savage tribes and in pestilential climates, who have often gone to their work with as clear a consciousness of deadly peril as if they had been on their way to a battle-field.