With what foul diseases, the very details of which would sicken, has he not had to be scourged withal to get him to recognize and obey the one Divine injunction, "Wash and be clean"! Truly his knowledge and recognition of sanitary law, his "physical righteousness," has had to be sown in the weakness and corruption of disease before it could be raised to the power of a recognized law of life, insuring that cleanliness which is next to godliness.
Again, take the great principle of national freedom,--that a nation has a right to govern its own destinies.

With what world tyrannies and oppressions, the outcome of man's selfish lust of power and wealth, have not the peoples had to fight and struggle in order at length to win and get recognized that principle of freedom without which a nation can be neither strong nor holy, neither a citadel nor a temple! The Iron Duke used to say, "There is but one thing worse than a battle gained, and that is a battle lost." Yet what battles lost and what battles gained, with all their sickening sights and sounds-- "Oaths, insults, filth, and monstrous blasphemies, Sweat, writhings, anguish, laboring of lungs, In that close mist, and cryings for the light, Moans of the dying and voices of the dead"; what bloody conflicts through the long ages have not had to be fought out to gain this freedom! Truly we might apostrophize Freedom in the words of the Hebrew prophet: "Who is this that cometh with her garments dyed in blood ?" Through what long centuries did not what Sir John Seeley called the "mechanical theory of government" survive, the theory which recognized no vital bond of blood and historical tradition between a people and its government, but looked upon nations as royal appanages, to be banded about with royal alliances and passed under an alien sway without consent on its own part! Did it not require a Napoleon to work out this false premiss to its bitter end, drenching Europe in blood to gratify his own greed of power, and reducing nation after nation to his alien and despotic rule, till it was felt to be intolerable, and with a convulsive struggle Europe threw off the yoke?
Truly a struggle which was the birth-throes of national sentiment and the recognition that the tie between the governed and the governing must be an organic one, a tie of blood from within, not a force from without--in one word, the recognition of the great principle of national freedom which, when the nation is sufficiently developed and self-disciplined to be fit for it, is the great mother of progress.

Sown in the corruption of those mangled and decaying corpses on many an awful battle-field, freedom is raised to the glory of an incorruptible truth of national life.
Once again, was it not in his age-long conflict with the great world evil of slavery that man worked out the true nature of a moral personality?
Man started at the outset with the evil premiss of the right of the strong to possess himself of the weak and the conquered, and enslave him for his own use, shunting the toil and burden of life upon his bowed shoulders.

Through long ages he had to work out this wrong premiss in disaster to empires through the laziness and worthlessness of their ruling classes engendered by slave labor, in the dumb suffering and bitter wrongs of millions of enslaved men and women.
Through centuries the Church protested against these wrongs in vain, since the evil root, in the face of all protests, will go on bearing the evil fruit.

England, herself the mother of free peoples, was stained with the guilt of being one of the first to originate the worst form of slavery that the world has ever seen, the African slave-trade, her great Queen Elizabeth not scorning to enrich her royal coffers out of the profits of slave-raiding expeditions conducted by her sea-captains.