--Well and good, adds an historian; but do you not know that the
Germans were they who poured a generous and free blood into the
impoverished blood of the men who had been fashioned by the slavery of
the empire? I contest nothing, and I am not sufficiently well-informed
to pronounce with confidence upon the action of all these historic
causes. But this I venture to affirm,--that if any one thinks to fix
definitely the hour when liberty was born in history, he is mistaken:
for it has no other date than that of the human conscience, and I will
say with M. Lamartine:
Give me the freedom which that hour had birth,
With the free soul, when first in conscious worth
The just man braved the stronger![31]
Liberty had birth the first time that, urged by his fellow men to acts
which wounded his conscience, a man, relying upon God, felt himself
stronger than the world. That Socrates had not studied, I fancy, in the
school of the Encyclopedists, and was no German either, that I know of,
who said to the judges of Athens, with death in prospect: "It is better
to obey God than men." And when those words were repeated by the
Apostles of the universal truth, the death of Socrates, that noble death
which has justly gained for him the admiration of the universe, was
reproduced in thousands and thousands of instances.
Pages:
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93