I know of no test that can be more
conclusively put to a community than that.
I want to suggest to the young men of this association that it is the
duty of young men not only to combine for the things that are good, but
to combine in a militant spirit. There is a fine passage in one of
Milton's prose writings which I am sorry to say I cannot quote, but the
meaning of which I can give you, and it is worth hearing.[E] He says
that he has no patience with a cloistered virtue that does not go out
and seek its adversary. Ah, how tired I am of the men who are merely on
the defensive, who hedge themselves in, who perhaps enlarge the hedge
enough to include their little family circle and ward off all the evil
influences of the world from that loved and hallowed group. How tired I
am of the men whose virtue is selfish because it is merely
self-protective! And how much I wish that men by the hundred thousand
might volunteer to go out and seek an adversary and subdue him!
I have had the fortune to take part in affairs of a considerable variety
of sorts, and I have tried to hate as few persons as possible, but there
is an exquisite combination of contempt and hate that I have for a
particular kind of person, and that is the moral coward.
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