The life of resistance: Why true virtue is defined by endurance, not progress

“ That was Progress.
We now pay seven or eight cents to ride on street cars and more than three cents a mile to travel on trains. All prices have advanced. The standard of living has declined and we ask ourselves if it will not have to decline still further. No one now talks of a six-hour day. We recognize a check in the process toward increasing well-being at less effort. Life has become more difficult. Progress is no longer a simple and steady movement onward in a single direction. Like evolution sometimes it seems to stand still or perhaps go back. Like evolution it requires a vital élan ”

“ We cannot all indulge ourselves in the complacency of the maiden lady who gave her age year after year as twenty-seven, because she said she was not one of these flighty things who say "one thing to-day and something else to-morrow."
Life is change. Only dead things remain as they are. Every living thing feels the winds of the world blowing over it, beating and buffeting it, marking and bleaching it. Change is a characteristic of life, and we must reckon on it! Progress is Life's first law! In order to be as good as we were yesterday, we have to be better. Life is built on a sliding scale ”

“ And literature cannot be said to have served its true purpose until it has been translated into the actual life of him who reads. It does not succeed until it becomes the vehicle of the vital. Progress is the gradual result of the unending battle between human reason and human instinct, in which the former slowly but surely wins. ”

“ There is no fear that the world will allow itself to be thus ensnared:—progress is the law of its nature; hope, and not regret, is the spring of its movement:—the future alone possesses an attractive virtue. Peoples who have emerged from slavery have always endeavoured by laws to prevent enfranchised man from again falling into servitude. ”

“ For if he avoids anything that is not a matter of free choice, he knows that some time he will encounter something in spite of his aversion to it, and will come to grief. Now if it is virtue that holds out the promise thus to create happiness and calm and serenity, then assuredly progress toward virtue is progress toward each of these states of mind. For it is always true that whatsoever the goal toward which perfection in anything definitely leads, progress is an approach thereto. ”

“ The world is stronger than the night; and the bindings of sense are tenfold stronger than the most exquisite delirium of soul. This makes you feel, or will one day make you feel, that life,—strong life and sound life,—that life which lends approaches to the Infinite, and takes hold on Heaven, is not so much a Progress as it is a Resistance!
There is one special confidence which, in all your talk about plans and purposes, you do not give to your father: you reserve that for the ear of Nelly alone. ”

“ There never comes a day when we can live nobly and worthily without effort, without resistance to wrong influences, without struggle against the power of temptation. It never gets easy to be good. Evermore the cross lies at our feet, and daily it must be taken up and carried, if we would follow Christ. We are apt to grow weary of this unending struggle, and to become discouraged, because there is neither rest nor abatement in it.
But here again we learn that it is out of just such struggles that we must get the nobleness and beauty of character after which we are striving. ”

“ Oh! be firm to Zeno, and to virtue! I tell you not—Zeno tells you not, that virtue is found in pleasure’s 67repose. Resistance, energy, watchfulness, patience, and endurance—these, these must be your practice, must be your habit, ere you can reach the perfection of your nature. The ascent is steep, is long, is arduous. To-day you must ascend a step, and to-morrow a step, and to-morrow, and to-morrow—and yet shall you be far from the summit, from rest, and from security. ”

“ When we come to consider those years of torture which cruel nature holds in store for some, no one blames the sight of the moral wreck it is apt to make of the sufferer. On the other hand, there is nothing I ever see in my profession so splendid as the way in which a few, a rare few, triumph over pain, which we know must often rise to the grade of anguish, and from which scarce a day is ever free.
I recall well one woman who for years, under my eyes, was the subject of what, with due sense of the force of the word, I call torture. ”

“ Who fears not knows not conscious courage. Endurance is noble, because it includes a voluntary defeat of our own unwillingness to endure. And, in general, every form of more complex rational life means a triumph over ourselves whereby alone we win ourselves. Whoever has not faced problems as problems, mysteries as mysteries, defeats as defeats, knows not what that completer possession of his own life means which is the outcome and also the present experience of triumph in the midst of finitude and disaster. ”

“ Because, again, if virtue is desirable, and if nothing that is good lacks virtue, then everything good is desirable. And, lastly, because a brave endurance even under torture is desirable. 6. At this point I ask you: Is not bravery desirable? And yet bravery despises and challenges danger. The most beautiful and most admirable part of bravery is that it does not shrink from the stake, advances to meet wounds, and sometimes does not even avoid the spear, but meets it with opposing breast. If bravery is desirable, so is patient endurance of torture ”

“ Besides, if you feel those endless tendencies, which, in spite of your change of life, still rise up within you against the law of God; that difficulty which you still have in doing well; that unfortunate inclination which you still find within you toward evil; those desires of a more perfect virtue, which always turn out vain; those resolutions to which you are always faithless; those opportunities in which you always find yourself the same; those duties which always meet the same repugnance in your heart ”

“ Life is growth. It moves along, pressing this way and that way, along the lines of least resistance, drawing to itself that which it needs for its complete expression and growth, using this thing and that thing to-day, and discarding them to-morrow, after they have served their purpose—after their helpful qualities have been extracted. ”

“ This new life will betake itself along the line of least resistance—or should we not rather say, the least resistances, as a "compromise with all the necessities," in a just balancing of pleasure and unpleasure? ”

“ And so we ought always with incessant care and anxiety to give ourselves up to the acquirement of virtue, and constantly to occupy ourselves with the practice of it, lest, if we cease to go forward, the result should immediately be a going back. For, as we said, the mind cannot continue in one and the same condition, I mean without receiving addition to or diminution of its good qualities. For to fail to gain new ones, is to lose them, because when the desire of making progress ceases, there the danger of going back is present. ”

“ When a man comes once to stand in need of fortune, his life is anxious, suspicious, timorous, dependent upon every moment, and in fear of all accidents. How can that man resign himself to God, or bear his lot, whatever it be, without murmuring, and cheerfully submit to Providence, that shrinks at every motion of pleasure or pain? It is virtue alone that raises us above griefs, hopes, fears and chances ”

“ Consider what freedom thou enjoyest, and how thou fearest and tremblest at no man when thou livest in company with virtue, neither enemy, nor plotter, nor informer, nor rival in credit or in love, nor envious person, nor poverty, nor sickness, nor any other human thing. But there, although ten thousand things be according to thy mind, though riches flow in as from a fountain, yet the war with rivals, and the plots, and ambuscades, will make more miserable than any the life of him who wallows with those women. ”

“ Lust and temptation are even like sharks in the river of life; the waters are the five senses. Do thou cross over to the other side of this river in the boat of patience and resignation, avoiding the shoals of corporeal existence (repeated births in this world) . The supreme virtue consisting in the exercise of the intelligent principle and abstraction, when gradually super-added to virtuous conduct, becomes beautiful like dye on white fabrics. Truthfulness and abstention from doing injury to any one, are virtues highly beneficial to all creatures. ”

“ Virtue, on the contrary, is a hidden manna: in order to taste all its sweetness, it is necessary to dig for it; but the more you advance, the more do its consolations abound; in proportion as the passions are calmed, the path becomes easy; and the more will you applaud yourselves for having broken asunder chains which weighed you down, and which you no longer bore but with reluctance and secret sorrow. ”

“ Now it is well worth observing that, on the one hand, the suffering and misery of life may easily increase to such an extent that death itself, in the flight from which the whole of life consists, becomes desirable, and we hasten towards it voluntarily; and again, on the other hand, that as soon as want and suffering permit rest to a man, ennui is at once so near that he necessarily requires diversion. The striving after existence is what occupies all living things and maintains them in motion. ”

“ Life is to be measured by action, not by time; a man may die old at thirty, and young at fourscore: nay, the one lives after death, and the other perished before he died. I look upon age among the effects of chance. How long I shall live is in the power of others, but it is in my own how well. The largest space of time is to live till a man is wise. He that dies of old age does no more than go to bed when he is weary. Death is the test of life, and it is that only which discovers what we are, and distinguishes betwixt ostentation and virtue. ”

“ Which tries and counter-stands the shock
And ram of time, and by vexation grows
The stronger; virtue dies when foes
Are wanting to her exercise, but great
And large she spreads by dust and sweat. ”

“ After long months of ceaseless anxiety and strain, after times when hope beat high and times when the outlook was black indeed, the end of the Endurance has come. But though we have been compelled to abandon the ship, which is crushed beyond all hope of ever being righted, we are alive and well, and we have stores and equipment for the task that lies before us. ”

“ The conclusion is, not that hardships are desirable, but that virtue is desirable, which enables us patiently to endure hardships.
5. Certain of our school, [4] think that, of all such qualities, a stout endurance is not desirable, – though not to be deprecated either – because we ought to seek by prayer only the good which is unalloyed, peaceful, and beyond the reach of trouble. Personally, I do not agree with them. And why? First, because it is impossible for anything to be good without being also desirable. ”

“ When one endures torture bravely, one is using all the virtues. Endurance may perhaps be the only virtue that is on view and most manifest; but bravery is there too, and endurance and resignation and long-suffering are its branches. ”

“ A brave man must expect to be tossed; for he is to steer his course in the teeth of Fortune, and to work against wind and weather. In the suffering of torments, though there appears but one virtue, a man exercises many. That which is most eminent is patience, (which is but a branch of fortitude.) But there is prudence also in the choice of the action, and in the bearing what we cannot avoid; and there is constancy in bearing it resolutely: and there is the same concurrence also of several virtues in other generous undertakings. ”

“ Endurance is a passive condition that cannot, and does not even try, to help itself. Resignation, in its true reading, is wholly another matter; it is active, it is alive, it is conscious and intelligent and in joyful co-operation with the will of God. It is no poor and negative mental state; it is rich in vitality and in hope, as well, for in its absolute identification of itself, this human will with the divine will, it enters into a kingdom of untold glory, whose paths lead by the river of life to the noblest and most exalted heights of achievement and of undreamed-of joy. ”

“ But common sense is a bad judge where great matters are in question. To obtain little from humanity we must ask much. The immense moral progress which we owe to the Gospel is the result of its exaggerations. It is thus that it has been, like stoicism, but with infinitely greater fulness, a living argument for the divine powers in man, an exalted monument of the potency of the will.
We may easily imagine that to Jesus, at this period of his life, everything which was not the kingdom of God had absolutely disappeared. ”

“ It is as though something had begun to slip—as though I haven’t the firm grip I had on events.—What is success? It is an inner, an indescribable force, resourcefulness, power of vision; a consciousness that I am, by my mere existence, exerting pressure on the movement of life about me. It is my belief in the adaptability of life to my own ends. Fortune and success lie with ourselves. We must hold them firmly—deep within us. For as soon as something begins to slip, to relax, to get tired, within us, then everything without us will rebel and struggle to withdraw from our influence. ”

“ Analysis.—Advance and Retrogression of Discovery and of Civilization. Progress dependent on realizing the relativity between Power and Function. This condition of success is examined at length.
Perception of existing Relations, and creation of new ones by human Reason and Will. Illustrations from histories of Invention, Art, Education, and Self-Education.
Production of Change within ourselves. Self conquest, Self formation, and Re-formation. Inability of animals arises from domination of motives unalterable by themselves and instinctively apprehended. ”

“ They had, in that rude life, certain images and resemblances of virtue, but yet they fell short of virtue itself, which comes only by institution, learning, and study, as it is perfected by practice. It is indeed the end for which we were born, but yet it did not come into the world with us; and in the best of men, before they are instructed, we find rather the matter and the seeds of virtue than the virtue itself. It is the wonderful benignity of Nature that has laid open to us all things that may do us good, and only hid those things from us that may hurt us ”

“ Wherefore it follows of necessity that every virtue which has a title to praise for the firm endurance of something difficult must be annexed to fortitude as secondary to principal virtue. Now the endurance of difficulty arising from delay in accomplishing a good work gives perseverance its claim to praise: nor is this so difficult as to endure dangers of death. Therefore perseverance is annexed to fortitude, as secondary to principal virtue. ”