Notes for Boys and Their Fathers on Morals, Mind, and Manners

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1888. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... NOTES FOR BOYS. OF UNSELFISHNESS. O my mind unselfishness (which in its broadest and fullest meaning includes self-denial and self-sacrifice) is the noblest of all the virtues; and further, as I have said elsewhere, disregard of self seems to me to be the very essence and kernel of Christianity. The great pattern and type of unselfishness is Jesus Christ himself, who went about doing good, and the supreme act of whose life was a deed of utter self-sacrifice. Unselfishness is a virtue which, so far as I am aware, is exclusively human. And not only is it distinctively human, but it is especially Christian. The heroes of old--Greeks, Romans, Norsemen--were brave and stoical, but they had little or no conception of the beauty and grandeur of unselfishness. True, there are tales more or less mythical of Horatius and Curtius. Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans could die for their country at Thermopylae; and Plato by the mouth of Socrates praises self-sacrifice. But these were only faint glimmerings of light in a vast universe of Cimmerian darkness. Even the worthies of the Old Testament had but a feeble grasp of this wonderful doctrine. It was reserved for the great Founder of Christianity to lay down a nobler axiom, and to teach the lesson that a man ought, if need be, to lay down his life for his brethren. "Au dela des devoirs de justice," says Victor Cousin, "il y a les devoirs de denouement qui ne sont plus soumis a des regies premises. Le devouement, 1'heYoisme, le sacrifice, c'est le luxe de la morale, luxe ncessaire et obligatoire, mais qui ne peut £tre impose sous forme de loi." 1 It is not only to the heroes of history that one must look for instances of this virtue. 1 "Besides the duties of justice," says Victor Cousin, "there are duties of devotio...