When I look at the fathers, I recollect that courage and love, faith and justice, have no swallowing horizon, while all that is petty and base succumbs in one generation to the laws of perspective. It is pleasanter thus. At the grave of the old schoolmaster who flogged us, we remember the silver hair and the apple he gave us once,--never the rattan. "We had fathers after the flesh who corrected us, and we gave them reverence," nothing but reverence, when we leaned with tearful eyes over their vacant chairs. If I have ever quarrelled with my friend, when he can return to me no more, I make up with his memory by canonizing him. The tendency to do thus is among the loveliest and divinest things in our nature. But it is a still lovelier and diviner thing to anticipate the parallax of time and look upon the present with the same loving, teachable, and reverent eyes, which shall be bent upon it from the standpoint of coming generations. He to whom the beauty and nobleness of his own time are, throughout all that he deplores in it and in himself, the conspicuous objects of love and veneration,--who extends the allowance of the dead to the faults of the living,--from whom no personal disappointments can ever take away his faith in the abiding divinity of his kind,--need never fear that his judgment of the fathers will be a churlish and disrespectful one. The only object which such a man can have in recalling the vices and defects of older generations is to establish their kinship with his own, to prove his era's legitimacy against philosophers who find only pettiness in the present and grandeur in the past. If he cannot make them see the good side by which the modern family receives blood from the ancient, there shall not be any bend sinister on his escutcheon because he neglects to show them the bad one, though he would rather vindicate his lineage the other way. To him the organic unity of mankind, throughout all generations, is dearer than the individual reputation of any one of them.
Having the faith of this organic unity he can look at the errors of the forefathers without pain. They lessen neither his love nor his respect for them. Who is there that would care to know king David only as a very respectable Jew, in a Sunday-school book, who was always successful, invariably pious, and passed his time wholly in playing hymns on a harp with a golden crown upon his head? To almost all young readers, and many an old one, the vindictive psalms seem a shocking inexplicability in the sacred canon. The philosopher, however, feels with the illiterate preacher, "It is a comfort to us poor erring mortals, my brethren, to remember that on one occasion even, David, beloved of the Lord, said not only, 'I am mad,' but 'I am fearfully and wonderfully mad?'" Not that it would be any comfort to us if that were all we possess of him; but we also have the record of his getting over it. I once knew a little boy who learned to swear out of the psalms, and it must be acknowledged that of good round curses there is in no tongue a much fuller armory. Conscientious persons, who want to damn their enemies without committing sin, no doubt often sit down and read an execratory psalm with considerable relief to their minds. Not in this spirit do men skilled in human nature peruse the grand rages of the many-sided fighting bard; not because they would cloak their errors with the kingly shadow of his own, do they rejoice that he exists for us to-day just where the rude, large simplicity of his original Hebrew left him, and that tame-handed biography has never been able to pumice him down into a demi-god. They are glad because these things prove him human and imitable. If his stormy soul triumphed over itself; if he could be beloved of the Infinite at a moment when the surges of both outer and inner vicissitude seemed conspiring to sweep him away, then we cease to hear his swearing or the clamor of his despair; and to us, whose modern spirits are not exempt from flood and hurricane, his grand voice chants only cheer down the centuries, and we know that there is love caring and victory waiting for us also in our struggle, since we are not the lonely anomalies of time.