By the Christmas Fire | Page 5

adds, "It was answered that all great and honorable actions were
accompanied with great difficulties, and must be enterprised with
answerable courages."
What fine spiritual audacity! Not courage, if you please, but courages.
There is much virtue in the plural. It was as much as to say, "All our
eggs are not in one basket. We are likely to meet more than one kind of
danger. What of it? We have more than one kind of courage. It is well
to be prepared for emergencies."
It was the same spirit which made William Penn speak of his colony on
the banks of the Delaware as the "Holy Experiment." In his testimony
to George Fox, he says, "He was an original and no man's copy. He had
not learned what he said by study. Nor were they notional nor
speculative, but sensible and practical, the setting up of the Kingdom of
God in men's hearts, and the way of it was his work. His authority was

inward and not outward, and he got it and kept it by the love of God.
He was a divine and a naturalist, and all of God Almighty's making."
In the presence of men of such moral originality, ethical problems take
on a new and exciting aspect. What is to happen next? You cannot find
out by noting the trend of events. A peep into a resourceful mind would
be more to the purpose. That mind perceives possibilities beyond the
ken of a duller intelligence.
I should like to have some competent person give us a History of Moral
Progress as a part of the History of Invention. I know there is a distrust
of Invention on the part of many good people who are so enamored of
the ideal of a simple life that they are suspicious of civilization. The
text from Ecclesiastes, "God made man upright; but they have sought
out many inventions," has been used to discourage any budding
Edisons of the spiritual realm. Dear old Alexander Cruden inserted in
his Concordance a delicious definition of invention as here used:
"Inventions: New ways of making one's self more wise and happy than
God made us."
It is astonishing how many people share this fear that, if they exert their
minds too much, they may become better than the Lord intended them
to be. A new way of being good, or of doing good, terrifies them.
Nevertheless moral progress follows the same lines as all other
progress. First there is a conscious need. Necessity is the mother of
invention. Then comes the patient search for the ways and means
through which the want may be satisfied. Ages may elapse before an
ideal may be realized. Numberless attempts must be made, the lessons
of the successive failures must be learned. It is in the ability to draw the
right inference from failure that inventive genius is seen.
"It would be madness and inconsistency," said Lord Bacon, "to suppose
that things which have never yet been performed can be performed
without using some hitherto untried means." The inventor is not
discouraged by past failures, but he is careful not to repeat them
slavishly. He may be compelled to use the same elements, but he is
always trying some new combination. If he must fail once more, he
sees to it that it shall be in a slightly different way. He has learned in

twenty ways how the thing cannot be done. This information is very
useful to him, and he does not begrudge the labor by which it has been
obtained. All this is an excellent preparation for the twenty-first attempt,
which may possibly reveal the way it can be done. When thousands of
good heads are working upon a problem in this fashion, something
happens.
For several generations the physical sciences have offered the most
inviting field for inventive genius. Here have been seen the triumphs of
the experimental method. There are, however, evidences that many of
the best intellects are turning to the fascinating field of morals. Indeed,
the very success of physical research makes this inevitable.
When in 1783 the brothers Montgolfier ascended a mile above the earth
in a balloon there was a thrill of excitement, as the spectators felt that
the story of Dædalus had been taken from the world of romance into
the world of fact. But, after all, the invention went only a little way in
the direction of the navigation of the air. It is one thing to float, and
another thing to steer a craft toward a desired haven. The balloon
having been invented, the next and more difficult task was to make it
dirigible. It was the same problem that had puzzled the inventors of
primitive times who had discovered that, by making use of a proper