You probably assess
yourself in such and such a way. Those who are your partisans assess you
thus and so. Those who are your opponents urge a different verdict. But
it does not make very much difference, because after you are dead and
gone some quiet historian will sit in a secluded room and tell mankind
for the rest of time just what to think about you, and his verdict, not
the verdict of your partisans and not the verdict of your opponents,
will be the verdict of posterity." I say that I used to say that to
myself. It very largely was not so. And yet it was true in this sense:
If the historian really speaks the judgment of the succeeding
generation, then he really speaks the judgment also of the generations
that succeed it, and his assessment, made without the passion of the
time, made without partisan feeling in the matter--in other
circumstances, when the air is cool--is the judgment of mankind upon
your actions.
Now, is it not very important that we who shall constitute a portion of
the jury should get our best judgments to work and base them upon
Christian forbearance and Christian principles, upon the idea that it is
impossible by sophistication to establish that a thing that is wrong is
right? And yet, while we are going to judge with the absolute standard
of righteousness, we are going to judge with Christian feeling, being
men of a like sort ourselves, suffering the same temptations, having the
same weaknesses, knowing the same passions; and while we do not
condemn, we are going to seek to say and to live the truth.
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