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Updated: May 3, 2025
Beginning with himself, he is in the most emphatic manner teaching the duty of self-reform and of self-improvement; and if the majority of men acted as he did, how much wiser, how much happier, how much more prosperous as a whole, would society become.
Philosophy, on the contrary, desires to be thought about thought, thought retracing its life and work, knowledge labouring to know itself, fact which aspires to fact about itself, mental effort to become free, to become entirely transparent and luminous in its own eyes, and, if need be, to effect self-reform by dissipating its natural illusions.
Last month in Latin America I saw for myself the quickening of hope, the revival of confidence, the new trust in our country among workers and farmers as well as diplomats. We have pledged our help in speeding their economic, educational, and social progress. The Latin American Republics have in turn pledged a new and strenuous effort of self-help and self-reform.
It has distributed 1.5 million school books and is building 17,000 classrooms. It has helped resettle tens of thousands of farm families on land they can call their own. It is stimulating our good neighbors to more self-help and self-reform fiscal, social, institutional, and land reforms. It is bringing new housing and hope, new health and dignity, to millions who were forgotten.
Reformation was a matter purely of expediency: to continue in profligacy would bring final exposure, and no parish would have him as a pastor. To get a valuable "cure" and a good "living" he must make attainments in divinity, pass a good examination, and have at least a decent reputation. Worldly policy urged him to apply himself on the one hand to his studies and on the other to self-reform.
The Put-Through Clan proceeds upon the idea that this is as true of his political or social or industrial body to which he belongs as it is of his first one. Reform must be self-reform first.
Our modern reformer is not always conscious of any need for self-reform. He lustily attacks the misdoings of others and remains happily ignorant of the Socratic rule, Know thyself. "Every unordered spirit is its own punishment," says St. Augustine, and the disorder is not removed by assaulting the faults of others. We have, first and last, to be captains of our own souls.
Yet without self-reform nothing is possible. "The character of the aggregate," says Herbert Spencer, "is determined by the characters of the units." And he illustrates thus: Suppose a man building with good, square, well-burnt bricks; without the use of mortar he may build a wall of a certain height and stability.
He afterward married my laconic cousin Sarah, whose shrewdness made him the first Duke of Marlborough, and last, I regret to chronicle, was George Hamilton, resting from his labors at self-reform. Soon after dark another congenial spirit, the most pusillanimous of them all, young William Wentworth, Sir William's son and Roger's nephew, entered the taproom dripping with rain.
Symptoms such as these boded ill for a self-reform of the church, and it was further imperilled by the difficulty which it is not easy to believe that Wolsey had forgotten. No measures would be of efficacy which spared the religious houses, and they would be equally useless unless the bishops, as well as the inferior clergy, were comprehended in the scheme of amendment.
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