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The Master of Repartee, and Other Preachments
The Master of Repartee and Other Preachments Author:Cyrus Townsend Brady General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1912 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: THE MEN OF VALLEY FORGE A PATRIOTIC DISCUSSION The Lord alone did lead him, and there was no strange god with him. -- Deuteronomy xxxii, 12. THE regard in which man has always held the hero appears to be the resultant of a natural tendency of the human race, as instinctive as religion. " The search after great men is the dream of youth and the most serious occupation of manhood"; it is, in fact, a religion ! The religions of the past, we are told, were built upon the hero, and the attempt to elevate humanity, which is the function of all religions, was made by holding before individuals, the characteristics and achievements of the highest representative of their own people. Each nation, each tribe, each family possessed its heroes, whom time and tradition elevated into gods; gods of myth and legend, but real enough to those who filled their temples and offered sacrifice upon their altars; gods whose worship played a part, great and useful, in assisting the first uncertain steps of the nations up that vastascent on which, with deep purpose, man still is toiling. With the lapse of time old memories faded, the individual hero became less local and concrete, and more general and abstract, the ideal developed more and more through the use of the real, until the virtue of all the galaxy of gods merged and blended into one, and man, through his own divinity, knew his god, arrived at the great conception, and before his eyes saw the vision of the one Heroic God, personal still, but not of any people, place, or name; grappled in his spirit and bestowed in his soul an idea and an ideal, which has never left ...« less