196 MEMORIAL OF JOSEPH HENRY. 



'/leaped into the eyes" of all who marked his walk and convef-sa- 

 tion. In the crystal depths of a nature like his, transparent in all 

 directions, we discern as well the felicity as the beauty of that habit 

 of mind which is begotten by the supreme love of Truth for her 

 own sake — a habit which is as much the condition of intellectual 

 earnestness, thoroughness, and veracity in penetrating to the reality 

 of things, as of moral honesty, frankness, sincerity, and truthful- 

 ness in dealing with our fellow-men. The great expounder of the 

 Nicomachean Ethics has taught us, and one of our own moralists 

 has amplified the golden thesis,* that high moral virtue implies the 

 habit of "just election" between right and wrong, and that to 

 attain this habit we need at once an intelligence which is impas- 

 sioned and an appetite which is reflective. And so in like manner 

 all high intellectual virtue implies a habit of just election between 

 truth and error — an election which men make, other things being 

 equal, according to the degree in which their minds are enamored 

 with the beauty of truth, as also in proportion to the ^degree in 

 which their" appetencies for knowledge have been trained to be 

 reflective and cautious against the enticements of error. I never 

 knew a man who strove more earnestly than Henry to make this 

 just election between right and wrong, between truth and error, or 

 who was better equipped with a native faculty for making the wise 

 choice between them. He had brought his whole nature under the 

 dominion of truthfulness. 



But while thus eager and honest in the pursuit of truth he had 

 nothing controversial in his temper. It was a favorite doctrine of 

 his that error of opinion could be most successfully combated, not 

 by the negative processes of direct attack, rousing the pride and 

 provoking the contumacy of its adherents, but rather by the affirm- 

 ative process of teaching, in meekness and love, the truth that is 

 naturally antagonistic to it. The King of Sweden and Norway 

 made him a Knight of St. Olaf, but St. Olaf 's thunderous way of 

 propagating Christianity — by battering down the idols of Norway 

 with Thor's own hammer — is not the way that his American 

 votary would have selected. There was nothing iconoclastic in 

 Henry^s zeal for truth. He believed that there is in all truth a 



*Dr. James H. ThornweU: Discourses on Truth. 



