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The William Penn Lectures
HEROES
IN
PEACE
1920
WALTER H. JENKINS, PRINTER
PHILADELPHIA
This is the sixth of the series of lectures known as the WILLIAM PENNLECTURES. They are supported by the Young Friends' Movement ofPhiladelphia Yearly Meeting, which was organized on Fifth month 13th,1916, at Race Street Meeting House in Philadelphia, for the purpose ofcloser fellowship, for the strengthening of such association and theinterchange of experience, of loyalty to the ideals of the Society ofFriends, and for the preparation by such common ideals for moreeffective work through the Society of Friends for the growth of theKingdom of God on earth.
The name of William Penn has been chosen because he was a GreatAdventurer, who in fellowship with his friends started in his youth onthe holy experiment of endeavoring "to live out the laws of Christ inevery thought and word and deed," that these might become the laws andhabits of the State.
John Haynes Holmes, of the Community Church, New York City, deliveredthis sixth lecture on "Heroes in Peace," at Race Street Meeting House,on Fifth month 9th, 1920.
Philadelphia, 1920.
[5]Heroes in Peace
In an essay published some years ago on Thomas Carlyle's famous book,Heroes and Hero Worship, Prof. MacMechan, a well-known student ofliterature in England, makes the following observation: "In 1840, 'hero'meant, most probably, to nine Englishmen out of every ten, a generalofficer who had served in the Peninsula, or taken part in the last greatfight with Napoleon, and who dined year after year with the Duke atApsley House on the anniversary of Waterloo. To most people 'hero' meanssimply 'soldier,' and implies a human soul greatly daring and greatlyenduring."
What Prof. MacMechan here tells us about the Englishman of 1840 isequally true of the [6]Englishman of today—is true, indeed, of allpeoples in all ages of history. Heroism has nearly always been taken toimply physical courage; physical courage has always found its mostterrible and dramatic expression in warfare; and, therefore, by anatural association of ideas, the hero has come to be identified withthe soldier. When we think of heroes, we almost instinctively findourselves thinking of armored champions of Greece and Rome, who werehelped to immortality by Plutarch, whom Emerson calls "the doctor andhistorian of heroism"; of King Arthur, and his knights of the RoundTable; of Harold and his men of iron on the field of Hastings; of theCrusaders, who marched to the East with the sword in the one hand andthe crucifix in the other, to wrest the holy city from the profaningclutch of the hated Moslem. Or, coming down to the [7]more modern times,if we speak of heroism to the Frenchman, he thinks of the first Emperorand the old guard which "dies but never surrenders"; to the Italian, hehails the names of Garibaldi and the Thousand; to the Englishman, heacclaims the "thin red line of heroes" who held the field of Waterloo,conquered India and Egypt, and recently defended the Empire from th