And so, my brothers, I beg of you to preach a heroic Christianity, for if there ever was a heroic religion it is ours. If you offer merely free transportation to a future heaven of delight on "flowery beds of ease," you will enlist only the coward and the sluggard. But everyone who has a drop of strong old Norse blood in his veins will prefer a heathen Valhalla, though builded in hell, to such a heaven. And his Norse instincts will be nearer truth than your counterfeit of a debased Christianity. But preach the city of God's righteousness on earth and now among men, and call on every heroic soul to take sides with God against sin within himself and the evil and misery all around him. There is an almost infinite amount of strength, endurance, and heroism in this "slow-witted but long-winded" human race waiting to leap up at the appeal to fight once more and win a victory after repeated defeats before the sun goes down. Appeal to this and point to the great "captain of our salvation made perfect through sufferings," and every man that is of the truth will hear in your voice the call of the Master and King. You will not be disappointed, but among the publicans and fishermen of America you will find heroic souls, who will leave all to follow, as faithfully and unflinchingly as those from the shores of Galilee.
And what of faith? Faith is the personal attachment of a soul to such a leader. Fortunately the Bible contains a scientific monograph on this subject. I refer, of course, to the eleventh chapter of the epistle to the Hebrews. And the whole result is summed up in a few words of the thirteenth verse. The great heroes, like Enoch, Noah, and Abraham, "saw the promises afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth."
They saw the promises afar off, dimly, on the horizon of their mental vision; as one looks into the distance and cannot tell whether what he sees be cloud or mountain. And until they could make up their minds that there was some substance in the vision, they did not embrace it. They were not credulous. Neither were they carelessly or heedlessly sure that there was and could be nothing in the vision but mist and fancy. They recognized that on their decision of the question hung the life of which they meant to make the very most. They looked again and again, and kept thinking about it. Thus they became and were "persuaded of them." And most people stop here with a merely intellectual faith in their heads, and very little in their hearts and lives. Not so these old heroes; they were not so purely and coldly intellectual that they could not _do_ anything. They "embraced them." They said, that is exactly what I want and need, and I'll have it, if it costs me my life.