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he said so easily, naturally and frankly. Whitman knew that he, himself, typified humanity, and so he sang the "Song of Myself," believing that this song was the honest thought of honest minds.

¶ Patriotism is a positive quality—it is love of country, and does not involve hatred of other countries. A patriot is one who loves his country, supports it, and works for its good. His individual interests are absorbed into the interest for the whole. He spends his time and energy for the people. Only a free man could be a patriot. He must have perspective and genuine faith. Such men are few. Whitman was a genuine patriot who loved his country because his country, he believed, would afford opportunity for the development of men and women who would be children of liberty.

¶ He loved Nature. He believed that the Great Power manifests Itself through all phenomena and every form of life; that there is in nature no high and low, no good and bad; that all is high and good.

Things petty and small did not interest him. He had a perspective of life, and saw as many seers have not yet

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¶ He loved men as individuals, as types, and as principles personified. He mourned the death of Lincoln as one incarnate for another. And who can forget the words of Lincoln when he first saw Whitman, " There goes a man!" ¶ Whitman could lose himself in the universal. Egotists such as he can do this. He could feel as the dying soldier -“I am that man," said Whitman.

¶ Walt Whitman had the dramatic perception, lived the life of all things, and he taught others the beauty of such

living. Whatever is, is good, was his attitude toward the world of Nature.

¶ He taught these: Live your own life. Be free. Be honest. Dare to sing the song of " Myself."

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OBERT INGERSOLL was humorist, iconoclast and lover of humanity.

It is said that the difference between man and the lower animals is that man has the ability to laugh. ¶ When you laugh you relax, and when you relax you give freedom to muscles, nerves and brain-cells. Man seldom has use of his reason when his brain is tense. The sense of humor makes a condition where reason can act. ¶ Ingersoll knew that he must make his appeal to man's brain. Paine knew this, too, and so did Voltaire, and Rousseau. But it is a winding way to reach the reason of most people. The unenlightened mind is in serious, solemn darkness do

¶Ingersoll let the light of human sympathy penetrate first, and from the good-nature which followed, he added good humor, then sent shafts of wit.

¶ He showed that not God, but man's conception of a god, was preposterous, ridiculous, childish, unjust, impossible. For those who would listen he showed the way to get a perspective and see mythology as mythology, no matter where its record was found.

¶ He caused men and women to use the same reasoning faculties when contemplating the character of a god as of a man, of history in one book as in another. He knew their conclusions would then be sensible and bring a degree of peace and happiness unknown before to the world.

¶ Ingersoll taught that what was wrong for men ought to be wrong for gods and saints; that what was considered not good, sin, for man on earth, should not be considered as fit for reward in heaven; that there was no justice in eternal punishment for temporal or temporary sins. ¶ Ingersoll asked men to be men-gentlemen in their religion, as they were in their politics and in their relations with their neighbors and families. Especially did he ask justice, plain common justice, for women and children, and for all those who were not physically able to enforce their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He asked consideration for criminals, those who had actually done wrong to their fellow-men.

¶He pleaded for Christians and Infidels alike to follow the Golden Rule, and do unto others as they would have these others do unto them.

¶ Robert Ingersoll preferred to every political and social honor the privilege of freeing humanity from the shackles of bondage and fear. He knew no holier thing than truth. He preferred using his own reason to receiving popular applause or approbation. His keen wit, clear brain and merciless sarcasm uncrowned the King of Superstition and made him a puppet in the court of reason.

¶ He dethroned for us the God of Wrath, and proved himself to be more noble, more lovable, more godlike, than the Jehovah of the Jews. No god today is so well loved as is this man.

ALPH WALDO EMERSON was our modern Plato.

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He brought from Asia and the East all that was applicable to Americans. The best of the philosophy of India, Egypt, Assyria, Greece and Rome was his. ¶ He was "the culminating flower" of a long line of New England clergymen, and he inherited not only the tendency to study but to think. “Beware when Nature sets loose a thinker in the land," he said. And Emerson himself had to beware, for his thinking caused men to fear for their theology

¶ Unitarians were supposed to be liberal. Emerson found that no denomination more surely than they has the god Terminus erected as limits beyond which no man may think with safety.

¶ But no one could mark the boundary and confines for Emerson's thought. He was master of his own mind ¶ No man had ever lived before Emerson who thought with less restraint. Had he lived in the time of Servetus he would doubtless have had a tragic death.

¶ Had he spoken in terms such as Ingersoll used, he would have been denounced as infidel-dangerous to mankind. ¶ But Emerson used always the scholarly expression, the chaste form, and the classic allusion. His heresy was cultured and gentle. His appeal was to the student mind, to men and women who lived in the realm of thought more than in the world of feeling.

¶ So Emerson was not feared by the common people— they did not know of him. The "Divinity Address" was nothing to them. The symbols of Greek and Roman mythology meant nothing to the churchgoing people of America

¶ But when Ingersoll talked frankly of the “Mistakes of Moses," the veil of the temple was rent in twain, and fathers and mothers clasped their children in their arms to keep them from impending imminent danger.

¶ Ingersoll was denounced by preachers, teachers and school boards.

¶ Emerson's philosophy stole softly into the homes of conservative culture and remained as one of the household, because he made heresy, pantheism and reason so beautiful and necessary that no one wanted to turn them away Father Taylor said that if Emerson were sent to Hell he would change the climate and start immigration in that direction. Literally he did these things for New England. Concord, Massachusetts, proudly claims him as her First Citizen. The city of Boston boasts of him as her most learned Native Son.

¶ America is proud to call him her great thinker, scholar and teacher, also poet and philosopher. We return again and again to his teaching for mental stimulant and soul tonic. ¶ He has made for Americans a philosophy that applies to the conduct of life, and in it is the wisdom of the ages.

`LBERT HUBBARD, the most positive human force

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of his time, is a man of genius in business, in art,

in literature, in philosophy. He is an idealist, dreamer, orator, scientist. In his knowledge of the fundamental, practical affairs of living, in business, in human interests, in education, politics and law he seems without a competitor.

¶ He is like Jefferson in his democracy, in teaching a nation to love to govern itself and to simplify all living.

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