The Lever That Moves the World

The power of truth can scarcely be overestimated, and the mind that earnestly seeks it becomes noble in its noble quest. If this can be said of truth in the abstract, and in its humbler manifestations, how omnipotent truth becomes in its grandest culmination and embodied in a being capable of inspiring our profoundest fear and deepest love. One may accept of religious forms and philosophies, and be little changed thereby. One may be perfectly saturated with ecclesiasticism, and still continue a small-natured man. But the man that accepts of Jesus Christ as a personal and living teacher, as did the fishermen of Galilee, that man begins to grow large and noble, brave and patient.

Egbert Haldane has been sketched as an ordinary youth. There are thousands like him who have been warped and marred by early influences, but more seriously injured by a personal and wilful yielding to whatever form of evil proved attractive. The majority are not so unwary or so unfortunate as he was; but multitudes, for whom society has comparatively little criticism, are more vitiated at heart, more cold-blooded and deliberate in their evil. One may form a base character, but maintain an outward respectability; but let him not be very complacent over the decorous and conventional veneer which masks him from the world. If one imagines that he can corrupt his own soul and make it the abiding-place of foul thoughts, mean impulses, and shrivelling selfishness, and yet go forward very far in God's universe without meeting overwhelming disaster, he will find himself thoroughly mistaken.