But I am sure that the poor man’s dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness and revelations of God.  Let him resist the characterlessness which often goes with being poor.  Let him insist on respecting the condition where he lives.  Let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he grows rich, he shall go out of the low door of the old familiar poverty with a true pang of regret, and with a true honor for the narrow home in which he has lived so long."[S]

    [S] Sermons. 5th Series, New York, 1893, pp. 166, 167.

The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer’s life consist in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner springs.  The backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently endured—­for what?  To gain a quid of tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and a bed, and to begin again the next day and shirk as much as one can.  This really is why we raise no monument to the laborers in the Subway, even though they be our conscripts, and even though after a fashion our city is indeed based upon their patient hearts and enduring backs and shoulders.  And this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose outward conditions were even brutaller still.  The soldiers are supposed to have followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed to have followed none.

You see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; and how strangely the complexities of this wonderful human nature of ours begin to develop under our hands.  We have seen the blindness and deadness to each other which are our natural inheritance; and, in spite of them, we have been led to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth show, and which may be present in the lives of others where we least descry it.  And now we are led to say that such inner meaning can be complete and valid for us also, only when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with an ideal.

* * * * *

But what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal?  Can we give no definite account of such a word?

To a certain extent we can.  An ideal, for instance, must be something intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and brightness that go with all intellectual facts.  Secondly, there must be novelty in an ideal,—­novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps.  Sodden routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another.  This shows that there is nothing absolutely ideal:  ideals are relative to the lives that entertain them.  To keep out of the gutter is for us here no part of consciousness at all, yet for many of our brethren it is the most legitimately engrossing of ideals.