Editorial February 26, 1903 Issue

The Recognition of Greatness

February, though the least of the months, has made itself so famous through its gifts that its days are all too few for its anniversaries.

Among literary lights it has brought us a Dickens, a Hugo, a Longfellow, a Holmes, a Horace Greeley, and a John Henry Newman; among scientists, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, and Edison; among musicians, Mendelssohn, and Handel; among patriots and statesmen, Robert Peel, Washington, Lincoln, Kosciusko. Of all these and many more we are reminded in this second month, and it is well if they lead us to forget present occupations in the remembrance of past achievements, for he is most worthy of his inheritance who is most mindful of those by whose labor and sacrifice he has been enriched. Moreover, we may find a stimulus to virtue in the thought that no man can be far removed from that greatness which he recognizes and gladly honors. That which we appreciate and approve in our brother is latent, if not active, in us, and we may thus know that are akin to all that we love and revere, and so verify the saying of Pythagoras that real friends have all things in common. All this speaks for the basic oneness, in kind and capacity, of all men, their common sonship and endowment in Him "of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named."

The pride that would link itself to greatness that it may have whereof to boast, is no less petty than abundant, but to find in the goodness and strength manifest in our follow-man, the proof of our kind and possibilities, is to recognize the splendor and dignity of true manhood and be strengthened, day by day, in our endeavor to attain it.

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