ETHICS 303 



virtues, to dissipate the exclusive prejudices of ethnic 

 morahty and to give selfishness the character of sin." ^ 



Now follows the important question, how is this 

 enthusiasm for purity and love to be kindled ; when we 

 think of "What an ardent enthusiasm He demanded 

 from His followers, and secondly, how frail and tender 

 a germ this passion naturally is in human nature ".^ 



It was by the force of example : ^ " The most lost 

 cynic will get a new heart by learning thoroughly to 

 believe in the virtue of even one man. Our estimate of 

 human nature is in proportion to the best specimen of 

 it we have witnessed. This then it is which is wanted 

 to raise the feeling of humanity into an enthusiasm ; 

 when the precept of love has been given, an image must 

 be set before the eyes of those who are called upon 

 to obey it, an ideal or type of man which may be 

 noble and amiable enough to raise the whole race and 

 make the meanest member of it sacred with reflected 

 glory. 



"Did not Christ do this ? Did the command to love 

 go forth to those who had never seen a human being 

 they could revere? Could His followers turn upon Him 

 and say. How can we love a creature so degraded, full 

 of vile wants and contemptible passions, whose little life 

 is most harmlessly spent when it is an empty round of 

 eating and sleeping ; a creature destined for the grave 

 and for oblivion when his allotted term of fretfulness and 

 folly has expired ? Of this race Christ Himself was a 

 member, and to this day is it not the best answer to all 

 blasphemers of the species, the best consolation when 



ip. 151. 2p_i32. 



'As many Rationalists and others may not have seen this passage, I 

 quote it in full as one of the many eloquent ones in Sir J. Seeley's Ecce 

 Homo. 



