Nor is it only with the natural habit of mankind that idealism
falls in, but with divine command. Were we not bid be perfect as our
Father in heaven is perfect? And what is that image of the Christ, what
is that world-ideal, the height of human thought, but the work of the
creative reason,--not of genius, not of the great in mind and fortunate
in gifts, but of the race itself, in proud and humble, in saint and
sinner, in the happy and the wretched, in all the vast range of the
millions of the dead whose thoughts live embodied in that great
tradition,--the supreme and perfected pattern of mankind?
Is it nevertheless true that there is falsehood in all this? that men
were never such as the heart believes them, nor ideal characters able to
breathe mortal air? by indulging our emotions, do we deceive ourselves,
and end at last in cynicism or despair? Why, then, should we not boldly
affirm that the falsehood is rather in us, in the defects by which we
fail of perfection, in our ignorant error and voluntary wrong? that in
the ideal, free as it is from the accidental and the transitory,
inclusive as it is of the common truth, lies, as Plato thought, the only
reality, the truth which outlasts us all? But this may seem a subtle
evasion rather than a frank answer.
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