But is it nice to criticise? Is it not more generous and aesthetic to be on good terms with everybody? What is there more desirable, they say, than to see the ministers of the various cults--the Catholic priest, the Protestant divine, the Jewish rabbi, the Unitarian minister, the Ethicist and Revivalist, arm in arm, and on the same platform, exchanging courtesies and praising one another's work? We are told that when we see such a gathering on one platform, we can be sure that the millenium has arrived. But it will be a millenium for the priest and the rabbi, the healer and the shouter--they are the only ones who will be benefited by such a Pentecostal assemblage. Such fellowship will no doubt throw its mantle of silence over a great many evils which fear the light, and encourage their authors to be defiant and indifferent to the truth. Where there is silence truth has no advantage over error. Is it worth while to sacrifice the most sacred privileges of men in order to bring priest and rabbi together?
A great cause is often lost from the desire of its sponsors to be "nice." The teacher who wants to be "nice" may manage not to tell any lies, but he never succeeds in telling any truths, either. He cannot afford to tell the truth, for it may hurt, and he is not "nice" if he hurts. When he cannot tell anything pleasant, he must hold his tongue. Such a teacher is like an acrobat dancing on a tight rope, all he can do is to save himself from falling. There is no more room in modern society for a teacher who is afraid to hurt than there is for the physician who would rather humor the patient than do his duty. And, yet, there are not a few who trim their thoughts so as to make only friends. If the whole truth should at any time escape them by accident, they hasten forthwith to qualify it, or to take back a part of it--just to be obliging and nice. There has never been a reformer in the world who could not have become the idol of the people by following such a method; but idols die and turn to dust, while the heroism of the martyred soul is a perennial benediction.
To be "nice" was never the policy of a really earnest man. If Jesus was a historical personage, it does not appear on the records that he ever tried to be "nice"--to pat the priests on the back, or to tell them what good fellows they were, and that when he and they met they should be careful to speak only of the things they agreed upon. Of course the inability, to be "nice" cost Jesus his life. His independence nailed him to the cross, but evidently he prized something else more than he did unity. Luther was not very "nice" when he tore the pope's bull in pieces, and nailed his challenge to Rome on the church doors where everybody could see it. How impolite! That, surely, was a poor way to make friends. "Let us have masculine men," cries Emerson, who was himself thrown out of his pulpit and his church, because he preferred independence to popularity.