essence of true nobility, is neglect of self. Let the thought of self
pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone, like the bloom from a
soiled flower. Surely it is a paradox to speak of the self-interest of a
martyr who dies for a cause, the triumph of which he will never enjoy;
and the greatest of that great company in all ages would have done what
they did, had their personal prospects closed with the grave. Nay, there
have been those so zealous for some glorious principle as to wish
themselves blotted out of the book of Heaven if the cause of Heaven
could succeed.

And out of this mysterious quality, whatever it be, arise the higher
relations of human life, the higher modes of human obligation. Kant, the
philosopher, used to say that there were two things which overwhelmed
him with awe as he thought of them. One was the star-sown deep of
space, without limit and without end; the other was, right and wrong.
Right, the sacrifice of self to good; wrong, the sacrifice of good to
self,--not graduated objects of desire, to which we are determined by
the degrees of our knowledge, but wide asunder as pole and pole, as
light and darkness: one the object of infinite love; the other, the
object of infinite detestation and scorn. It is in this marvellous power
in men to do wrong (it is an old story, but none the less true for
that),--it is in this power to do wrong--wrong or right, as it lies
somehow with ourselves to choose--that the impossibility stands of
forming scientific calculations of what men will do before the fact, or
scientific explanations of what they have done after the fact. If men
were consistently selfish, you might analyze their motives; if they were
consistently noble they would express in their conduct the laws of the
highest perfection. But so long as two natures are mixed together, and
the strange creature which results from the combination is now under one
influence and now under another, so long you will make nothing of him