New England Religious Herald

TRUE GREATNESS.

Let us thank Heaven, too, that there are other standards of greatness besides vastness of territory; and other forms of wealth besides mineral deposits or agricultural exuberance. Though every hill were a Potosi, though every valley, like that of the Nile, were rank with fatness, yet might a nation be poor in the most desperate sense; benighted in the darkness of barbarism, the judgment stricken of Heaven for its sins.—

A State has local boundaries which it cannot rightfully transcend; but the realm of intelligence, the sphere of charity, the moral domain in which the soul can expand and expatiate, are illimitable,—vast and boundless as the omnipresence of the Being that created them.

Worldly treasure is of that nature that rust may corrupt, or the moth destroy, or thieves steal; but even upon the earth, there are mental treasures which are unapproachable by fraud, impregnable to violence, and whose value does not perish, but is redoubled with the using. A State, then, is not necessarily fated to insignificance because its dimensions are narrow, nor doomed to obscurity and powerlessness because its numbers are few. Athens was small; yet, low as were her moral aims, she lighted up the whole earth as a lamp lights up a temple. Judea was small; but her prophets and her teachers were, and will continue to be, the guides of the world.

The narrow strip of half-cultivated land, that lies between her eastern and western boundaries, is not Massachusetts; but her noble and incorruptible men, her pure and exalted women, the children in all her schools, whose daily lessons are the preludes and rehearsals of the great duties of life, and the prophecies of future eminence,—these are the State.

Horace Mann.