Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE REALITIES OF LIFE Facing The Facts Of Life We have seen that the method of life includes, as indispensable, utter honesty, open-minded facing of the facts, and honest reaction upon them. And the really honest man must be willing to face all the facts, — not only the facts that lie upon the surface, but the facts of the whole man; the less obvious but deeper realities; the facts that underlie man's whole ideal struggle. What would that mean to the thoughtful man ? I suppose there are few things that the real man or woman hates more than simply to mark time — to go through the motions of things without getting anywhere. And surely, if there is any place where, above all, the real man does not wish to mark time, it must be in the region of his moral and spiritual life. It seems, therefore, pecul- iarly worth while, at times, to call up into clear consciousness those silent assumptions that underlie all earnest moral and religious endeavor. Beneath all such individual effort, beneath all the activities and services of the Church, beneath all the labor of Christian education, beneath all the ideal enterprises of the race, there lies, first of all, the clear assumption that the supreme interests are those of character; that, as Thomas Arnold used to say to the boys at Rugby, whence have gone out so many of the leaders of English political life, "The only thing of moment in life or in man is character" ; or, as another has put it, "The great soul will be strong to live, as well as to think." To have failed here, is fundamental failure, whether for the individual or the civilization. For, as Eucken says, "every culture that does not treat the ethical task, in the widest sense, as the most important of tasks, and the one that decides all, sinks inevitably to a mere sem...