Saturday, May 01, 2010

The School of Love & Other Essays, May 1

COURAGE

[continued from yesterday]

...No, if we understand aright, we shall see that this type condemns itself. For courage, as we have acknowledged at the outset of this essay, is the power to face and go through with things that are hard; to shirk a duty, on whatever plea, is always the mark of a coward.

To have done wrong and not to own it, that so one may escape the consequent repentance, is cowardice and nothing more.

To have done wrong and to acknowledge it, yet to leave it unatoned for and unhealed, is cowardice of another kind, more pitiful perhaps than the first but no less real.

But to have done wrong, and to acknowledge it, and then to "brave it out" with arrogance, and mockery, and laugh­ter; to break the law and to teach the same to others by word, and example, and compulsion; that is the greatest cowardice of all.

And it meets with a coward's doom, not only in the next life but even in this; for such a man, despite the din and recklessness around him, is devoid of friends, has killed all human sym­pathy, and when his day is ended there will not be one who will feel that the world is the poorer for his loss.
___________
From The School of Love and Other Essays
by The Most Reverend Alban Goodier, S.J.
Burns, Oates, & Washburn, Ltd. 1918

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