All my readers will think of some “star player” in this hard game of patience and endurance, and will have watched with awe and reverence the glorious fight of some of those unrecorded heroes who won but got no valor medal. The only person who ranks higher in the scale of heroism than the hero as invalid is possibly the person who patiently, lovingly nurses and cares for some invalid through years of decline and suffering. Generally, though not always, it is a woman. Not seldom she is called upon to consecrate her life to the task, and often she gives what is much more precious than life itself. We build no monuments to daughters who unmurmuringly forego the joy of married life, who refuse the suit of love in order to be free to ease the closing years of father or mother, grown helpless; but where is there higher consecration or finer heroism? Men sometimes complain that the days of chivalry and heroism are past. On the contrary, they are more truly dawning. As Christianity ripens love grows richer and deeper, and where love appears heroism is always close at hand. Our best heroes are mothers and wives and daughters, fathers and husbands and sons.
During one of the intense persecutions by which an early Roman emperor harried the Christians of the first century, some unknown writer (Harnack thinks It was a woman) wrote an extraordinary little book to hearten those who were undergoing the trial of their faith. I mean, of course, the Epistle to the Hebrews. It is marked by rare genius and by undoubted inspiration. It is full of vital messages and it contains passages of great power. Just before the most loved section of the little book—the account of the faith-heroes—the author, in a passage open to a variety of translations, refers to the fact that those to whom he is writing have suffered, and have suffered joyfully, the spoiling of their possessions, “knowing,” he says, “that you have your own selves for a better possession”—you yourselves are a better possession than any of those goods which you have lost for your faith.
I wonder if the readers fully realized the truth, or if we should to-day realize it had we suffered a similar stripping. We are very slow to take account of that type of stock. We are very keen about our own assets, but we often fail to prize this supreme ownership, the possession of ourselves. There is a story, both sad and amusing, of an insane man who was seen wildly rushing about the house, from room to room, looking in cupboards and clothes-presses, crawling under beds, obviously searching for something. When questioned as to what he was so frantically looking for, he replied, “I am trying to find my self!” It is not as mad as it seems. I am not sure but that we who are not trying to find ourselves are after all more crazy still.