HEROISM 199 



his advice upon some point of conduct. ' Now,' 

 he said, ' how do you suppose Christ would have 

 advised you ? ' and when I had answered that 

 he would not have counselled me anything un- 

 kind or cowardly, * No,' he said, with one of his 

 shrewd strokes at the weakness of his hearer, 

 * nor anything amusing.' Later in life, he made 

 less certain in the field of ethics. * The old story 

 of the knowledge of good and evil is a very true 

 one,' I find him writing ; only (he goes on) ' the 

 effect of the original dose is much worn out, leaving 

 Adam's descendants with the knowledge that 

 there is such a thing but uncertain where.' His 

 growing sense of this ambiguity made him less 

 swift to condemn but no less stimulating in counsel. 

 ' You grant yourself certain freedoms. Very well,' 

 he would say, * I want to see you pay for them 

 some other way. You positively cannot do this : 

 then there positively must be something else that 

 you can do, and I want to see you find that out 

 and do it.' Fleeming would never suffer you to 

 think that you were living, if there were not, 

 somewhere in your life, some touch of heroism, 

 to do or to endure. 



This was his rarest quality. Far on in middle His love 

 age, when men begin to lie down with the bestial 

 goddesses, Comfort and Respectability, the strings 

 of his nature still sounded as high a note as a 

 young man's. He loved the harsh voice of duty 



