United States or Yemen ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We have this day restored the Sovereign, to whom alone men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven, and with a propitious eye beholds His subjects assuming that freedom of thought and dignity of self-direction which He bestowed on them. From the rising to the setting sun, may His kingdom come.
Irresolute in thought, impotent in will, and only occasionally fretted by circumstances into a feeble activity, he is an almost painfully accurate representation of a class of men who drift through life without any power of self-direction. Mrs. Westervelt has equal moral feebleness with less brain, and her character is a study in practical psychology.
From Rouse's Point through Northern New York, through endless woods and leagues of brilliant fire-weed, the spirit of the dead flames that raved through the woods, past corn-fields that looked rather "skimpy," certainly not to be compared to a corn-field I wot of, whose owner has a mono-mania on the subject of corn and potatoes, and fertilizes his fields with his own blood and brain, a snort, a rush, a shriek, and the hundred miles is accomplished, and we are at Ogdensburg, a smart little town, like all American towns, with handsome residences up, and handsomer ones going up, with haberdashers' shops, and lawyers' offices, and judges' robes, and most hospitable citizens, one at least, and all the implements and machinery of government and self-direction, not excepting a huge tent for political speaking and many political speeches, and everybody alert, public-spirited, and keyed up to the highest pitch.
They do not direct their own Education as though they had any object in life. They seem to lay helpless in the hands of the world, the pets or playthings of the day. These remarks are not very inapplicable to young men also. There is a great body of young men who float on the stream of life with no self-direction.
But at no point and in no case have either the proposals or their carrying out taken shape as a concrete application of the familiar principle of popular self-direction. It has always come to something in the way of a concessive or expedient mitigation of the antagonistic principle of personal authority.
But he had a way with him. He said the League was a great scheme of self, with the "ish" left off. In the League one practiced self-help, and enjoyed the twin luxuries of self-direction and self-expression, and came sooner or later to that strange new knowledge which is self-discovery.
Remove the moral taboos that now bind the human body and spirit, free the individual from the slavery of tradition, remove the chains of fear from men and women, above all answer their unceasing cries for knowledge that would make possible their self-direction and salvation, and in so doing, you best serve the interests of society at large.
Bancroft, "still acknowledged the fixedness of the divine decrees, and the resistless certainty from all eternity of election and of reprobation, there were not wanting, even among the clergy, some who had modified the sternness of the ancient doctrine by making the self-direction of the active powers of man with freedom of inquiry and private judgment the central idea of a protest against Calvinism."
In brief, love should increase, instead, like that which oftenest profanes love's name, of diminishing, the power of aspiration, of self-direction, of self-restraint, which may exist within us. Now to tend to this is to tend towards the love of the "Vita Nuova;" to tend towards the love of the "Vita Nuova" is to tend towards this.
It is not a bit easier to think of self-existence or self-direction in connection with a god than it is in connection with the universe. And if we must rest ultimately with an insoluble difficulty, it is surely better to stop with the existence we know rather than to introduce a second existence which for all we know may be quite mythical.
Word Of The Day