In truth, grit, in its highest forms, is not a form of courage deserving of unmixed respect and admiration. Admitting its immense practical influence in public and private life, conceding its value in the rough, direct struggle of person with person and opinions with institutions, it is still by no means the top and crown of heroic character; for it lacks the element of beauty and the element of sympathy; it is individual, unsocial, bigoted, relatively to occasions; and its force has no necessary connection with grandeur, generosity, and enlargement of soul. Even in great men, like Cromwell, there is something in its aspect which is harsh, ugly, haggard, and ungenial; even in them it is strong by the stifling of many a generous thought and tolerant feeling; and when it descends to animate sterile and stunted natures, endowed with sufficient will to make their meanness or malignity efficient, its unfruitful force is absolutely hateful. It has done good work for the cause of truth and right; but it has also done bad work for the cause of falsehood and wrong: for evil has its grit as well as virtue. As it lacks, suppresses, or subordinates imagination, it is shorn of an important portion of a complete manhood; for it not only loses the perception of beauty, but the power of passing into other minds. It never takes the point of view of the persons it opposes; its object is victory, not insight; and it thus fails in that modified mercy to men which springs from an interior knowledge of their characters. Even when it is the undaunted force through which moral wrath expresses its hatred of injustice and wrong, its want of imaginative perception makes it somewhat caricature the sinners it inveighs against. It converts imperfect or immoral men into perfect demons, which humanity as well as reason refuses to accept; and it is therefore not surprising that the prayer of its indignant morality sometimes is, "Almighty God, condemn them, for they _know_ what they do!" But we cannot forget that there sounds down the ages, from the saddest and most triumphant of all martyrdoms, a different and a diviner prayer,--"Father, forgive them, for they know _not_ what they do!"