ourselves: but that we should toil for them, suffer for them, and if need
be, as the highest act of goodness, die for them at last? Is not this
the very element of goodness which we all confess to be most noble,
beautiful, pure, heroical, divine? Divine even in sinful and fallen man,
who must forgive because he needs to be forgiven; who must help others
because he needs help himself; who, if he suffers for others, deserves to
suffer, and probably will suffer, in himself. But how much more
heroical, and how much more divine in a Being who needs neither
forgiveness nor help, and who is as far from deserving as He is from
needing to suffer! And shall this noblest form of goodness be possible
to sinful man, and yet impossible to a perfectly good God? Shall we say
that the martyr at the stake, the patriot dying for his country, the
missionary spending his life for the good of heathens; ay more, shall we
say that those women, martyrs by the pang without the palm, who in secret
chambers, in lowly cottages, have sacrificed and do still sacrifice self
and all the joys of life for the sake of simple duties, little charities,
kindness unnoticed and unknown by all, save God--shall we say that all
who have from the beginning of the world shewn forth the beauty of self-
sacrifice have had no divine prototype in heaven?--That they have been
exercising a higher grace, a nobler form of holiness, than He who made
them, and who, as they believe, and we ought to believe, inspired them
with that spirit of unselfishness, which if it be not the Spirit of God,
whose spirit can it be? Shall we say this, and so suppose them holier
than their own Maker? Shall we say this, and suppose that they, when
they attributed self-sacrifice to God, made indeed a God in their own
image, but a God of greater love, greater pity, greater graciousness
because of greater unselfishness, than Him who really exists?

Shall we say this, the very words whereof confute themselves and shock
alike our reason and our conscience? Or shall we say with St John and