The Irish standard. [volume] (Minneapolis, Minn. ;) 1886-1920, 1902-03-01

There is higher love than love Of
country-the love of truth, the love of
Justice, the love of Righteousness, and
he alone is a patriot who is willing
to suffer obloquy and the loss of
money and friends than betray the
cause of truth, justice and righteous
ness, for only by being faithful to this
can he rightly serve his country, says
Rt. Rev. John Lancaster Spalding,
Bishop Of Peoria.
Moral causes govern the standing
and falling of States as of individuals
and conquering armies move forward
in vain; in vain the feeting fabric Of
trade is spread if a moral taint within
slowly molder all. The national life
is at fault if it be not in harmony with
the eternal principles on which all
right human life rests. The greatest
and the nohlest men when they meet
rise into regions where all merely ma
tional distinctions are forgotten and
of philosopher, a poet OF man Of
science, we give little heed to what
country he was born and lived in, so
eager are we to learn the truth and
beauty he reveals-truth and beauty
which are of no country, which are
wide and all-embracing as the universe.
In the presense Of heroic virtue, also
the national limitations disappear, that
the Godlike man who belongs to all
countries and ages may stand forth in
his proper light.
A man supremely endowed narrows
his mind when he is less than uni
versally human. What he says and
does should make laws for all-those
diviner laws which have their sanction
in the common sense which makes the
whole world akin.
Patriotism as understood by the
ancients is but a partial virtue. When
it is&most intense, it is most narrow
and intolerant. In Jerusalem, in
Athens, in Rome, the city was the
fatherland. 1t was the thought of
Zion and of "Silva's brook that flowed
fast by the oracle of God," of Acropo-
lis, with it's marvellous setting in the
midst of the Attic plain, Of the world
mother looking from her Seven Hills
on the Tiber's tawny wave that made,
the exiles waste away with repinings
for home and their passionate devo-
tion to their country was rarely separ-
able from a hatred of the foreign ma
ture. Whoever was not citizen was
an enemy and slave. The captive
foe was treated with pitiless cruelty
and the slave had no rights. We are
separated from those ancient patriots
less by the long lapse Of time which
has intervened than by the difference
of spirit in which we look upon and
love our country. For us the man is
more than the citizen, humanity more
sacred than nationality. To lead
mans life one must live for someone
or for something other than himself.
AS we can see ourselves only in what
is in others, SO we can find and love
ourselves only in what is other than
ourselves
To escape from the stained condi-
ton of the isolated, the individual is
impelled to identify himself with
larger unities-with the family, with
the State with mankind, with God.
Now for the ancients, the State was
the ultimate unity in which man
could find and feel himself; hence their
aims and sympathies were partial and
narrow. Their patriotism was more
intense, but it was less rational, less
moral, and, therefore less enduring and
less beneficent than ours. 1t was not
,,ossible for them to identify them
selves with the race, to recognize that
alI men are made of one blood, and
that whenever one suffers injustice
wrong is done to all. But for us ma
tionality has ceased to be the limit
of individual sympathy, and the op-
preston of peoples, however remote,
often artFeee fleets 1,s.as though we ourselves
had been ipjufed while noble words