Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women, page 139 by George Sumner Weaver
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should we love him if we had seen him and known him well. It is his character that we have and not his person. His character is as clear and glorious to us as it was to his compeers. It thrills us as delightfully and moves upon us as powerfully as it did upon them. It is a glory hung around the name of America to which the world looks with a reverent and admiring joy. To tell me that I can not love Washington would be to rob me of the highest pride I feel in my country. I love him for what he was in the day of his earthly glory, the man of all majesty, the pride of all nations. I love him for what he did, for the life of spotless virtue and magnificent wisdom and goodness. He lived for the good of his country and the world. I love him for the tall angel of light that he now is, and the celestial richness of the glory that streams from his brow. I know I love him, and no philosophy or skepticism can cheat me out of that love.
I could name a hundred characters that have lived in the past and now live in heaven that I know I love in the same way. I love them as really as I do my personal friends, and love them in proportion to the greatness and goodness I see in them. I may say the same of many living men and women. Speaking from my own experience, I should say that I can love goodness, worth, all that is lovable in character as well as in a being that I have not seen as one that I have. I have known of people who have an earthly father living that they have never seen, and whom they love with a deep and rich fervency of affection. I have known of children whom poverty or accident has separated in infancy from their mother, and who cherished for that unknown, far-off maternal friend a sacred and deathless love. They have meditated hours, days, and weeks on the sad separation and the sweet, holy bosom from which they drew the breath of life. In well-formed minds this love grows up with their growth and strengthens with their strength. The idea of parentage awakens love in the heart. The relation is s