Moral Courage

A virtue in action always impresses us more deeply than the same virtue described or given in a code of essential morals. "The law of the Lord is perfect". We agree to this truth and admire the moral perfection. But when in the life of Jesus Christ we see perfect righteousness living and moving among us, speaking the language, mingling in society, toiling, suffering, dying, we are moved as no abstract concept of reighteousness could possibly move us. "The Good Shepherd giveth his life to the sheep." We catch these words as they fall from the lips of the Great Master only to feel their force and beauty, but when we read in the story of the gospel how the Good Shepherd gave his life for the sheep, then for the first time we catch the fullness of glorious meaning there may be in a self-sacrifice. In the text we have in action a virtue which has about it something of regal air and port, it is moral courage, moral courage displayed under great allurements to temporizing expedients, or cowardly abandonment of convictions.

Another example of extreme moral courage in the bible is found in Daniel 6:10. Daniel became second only to the king of Babylon, rising from slavery. This caused hatred among king Darius' subordinate officers toward Daniel. They hatched a plan to cause disfavor of Daniel in the eyes of the king. They persuaded the king to sign a decree stating that for thirty days no one was to pray to any god or man save for the King himself, Now Daniel upon hearing of the decree might have considered to obey the decree, pray in secrecy, cease prayer for the thirty days or pray as he had; in sight of all Babylon three times a day. Daniel chose to "pray and give thanks to my God, as afortimes." This virtue in action heightened Daniel in the eyes of the Jewish people.

James O. Murray D.D. in a serman given November 5, 1893, "moral courage has for its principal element "faith in righteouness." All moral courage worthy the name is formed in the belief that righteousness has some fixed and absolute standard. That standard is God's revealed will. The moment it assumes to human view any other shape, it no longer seems a thing worth contending for. It will not have content enough to appeal to this high quality of manhood, courage. On the view that righteousness is no mere thing of to-day or yesterday, no mere accretion of human experience touching elements of life, but something embodied in an all holy and infinite personal will and eternally linked with an infinite goodness, it becomes to human view, what must appeal to everything in man noblest and strongest, for its assertion and vindication. All moral heroes of the world have had this simple and sublime faith in righteounsness." Most people believe in moral courage so long that it suits them. It is not righteousness of the supreme kind but of partial implement. The true Apex of moral courage is found in God's Plan and rooted in faith in Jesus Christ as the Founder of the Kingdom of righteousness on earth.

"Looked at in its deepest aspect, all human life is a battlefield on which the conflict between good and evil is ever waging. Every human soul, every community,every form of organized society, the whole moral system-here is its arena. There is no escape from it. It is the inevitable condition of our existence, and must be accepted by us. You can flee from it into no monasteries, you can shun it in no solitary hermitages. It is within you as the kingdom of God is within every christian man, to become the ruler there. As the arena for struggle is universal, so the conflict is incessant. You read it in every page of history. You hear it its noise and outcries above even the din of battlefields, You find it sounding the deepest note in literature, as great tragedy comes sweeping by us in the titanic woes of Lear and the titanic struggles of Macbeth. Nay, you know that it maked up the saddest and most woeful part of that vast unwritten history which only the day of judgement shall unroll before us.

"The necessity for moral courage, then, absolute and unintermitting, springs from this factor of our moral condition. No good part in life can be played without it. Every profession calls for it. The life you lead here, with its occasions for this virtue, is but a type of whatisto come, only in greater degree and on a larger scale. The old martyrdom has gone, its mission nobley fulfilled. But there aer still, as the poets sing, martyrs by the pang without the palm."-James O. Murray D.D