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Updated: May 11, 2025
They make upright civil servants, conscientious clergymen, schoolmasters, lawyers, and journalists, pushing agents, resourceful engineers, steady-going and often prosperous farmers, and strong, quick, intelligent labourers. Of the "self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control" needful to make a sound race they have an encouraging share.
Brethren, there is a better way than that. A modern poet says 'Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lift life to sovereign power. Taken by itself that is pure heathenism. Self cannot improve self. Put self into God's keeping, and say, 'I cannot guard, keep, purge, hallow mine own self.
This is all attractive and delightful; but the people wants stamina, wants conscience, wants self-reverence. Dante's soul has died out of the land. Enough of this. As for France, I have 'despaired of the republic' for very long, but the nation is a great nation, and will right itself under some flag, white or red. Don't you think so?
I exist, I receive sensations, I suffer, I rejoice, as a whole. And this lays me open to universal, to incalculable, pain. Now my nerves are shattered intellectual, moral, physical anguish permeate in every part. I rally my self-reverence, my nobility of soul. I make efforts. By day I visit spots of natural beauty and objects of art. But these refuse to gratify me.
If our previous remarks are true, they give us material for judging how far the counsels of some very popular moral teachers should be followed. It is a very old advice, 'know thyself; and it is a very modern one that 'Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control Lead life to sovereign power.
Discipline is being outwardly preserved, but the destroying forces are creeping into every weak place, and the men of our time may see strange things. Gradually a certain resolute body of men are teaching weaker people that even self-discipline is unnecessary, and that self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control are only phrases used by interested people who want to hold others in slavery.
And in a noble sense it is true, but the deepest self-knowledge will lead to self-abhorrence rather than to self-reverence; and self-control is only possible when, knowing our own inability to cope with our own evil, we cast ourselves on that Lamb of God who beareth away the sin of the world, and ask Him to guide and to keep us.
Civilization, I say, is a mere mushroom growth, as compared with the whole life-period of man's existence on earth. It is only ten thousand years old; while, by the most modest and cautious calculation, man has existed one hundred thousand years; and during the ninety thousand which preceded the last ten, he made gigantic progress towards self-knowledge and self-reverence.
The elements which form his ideal of human character are self-reverence, self- knowledge, self-control, the recognition of a divine order, of one's own place in that order, and a faithful adhesion to the law of one's highest life. "In Memoriam" is his most characteristic work, distinctly a poem of this century, the great threnody of our language.
Courtesy is measured by the giver, not by the receiver. We are apt sometimes to think that this continual care of self is selfishness; it is the very reverse. Self-reverence is the antipode of self-conceit, of selfishness. If you honour yourself, you will be careful that nothing dishonourable shall come from you.
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