For here, and wherever military training goes on, must be kept in
check those sins of self-will, conceit, self-indulgence, which beset
all free and prosperous men. Here must be practised virtues which
(if not the very highest) are yet virtues still, and will be such to
all eternity.
For the moral discipline which goes to make a good soldier or a
successful competitor on this ground,--the self-restraint, the
obedience, the diligence, the punctuality, the patience, the
courtesy, the forbearance, the justice, the temperance,--these
virtues, needful for those who compete in a struggle in which the
idler and the debauchee can take no share, all these go equally
toward the making of a good man.
The germs of these virtues you must bring hither with you. And none
can give them to you save the Spirit of God, the giver of all good.
But here you may have them, I trust, quickened into more active life,
strengthened into more settled habits, to stand you in good stead in
all places, all circumstances, all callings; whether you shall go to
serve your country and your family, in trade or agriculture, at home;
or whether you shall go forth, as many of you will, as soldiers,
colonists, or merchants, to carry English speech and English
civilization to the ends of all the earth.
For then, if you learn to endure hardness--in plain English, to
exercise obedience and self-restraint--will you be (whether regulars
or civilians) alike the soldiers of Christ, able and willing to fight
in that war of which He is the Supreme Commander, and which will
endure as long as there is darkness and misery upon the earth; even
the battle of the living God against the baser instincts of our
nature, against ignorance and folly, against lawlessness and tyranny,
against brutality and sloth.
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