It has been shrewdly said, that, "when the Lord wants anything done
in this world, he makes a man a little wrong-headed in the right
direction." With this goes the disposition to overestimate the
importance of one's work and to push principles and theories towards
extremes. The saying is true of some individuals at or before certain
crises in affairs; it is not true of the great inevitable historical
movements, any more than the history of revolutions is the history of
nations. Halifax is called a trimmer. William Wilberforce was a
reformer. Each did a great work. But it would be simply absurd,
except in the estimation of the moral purist, to call Wilberforce as
great a man or as great an historical and influential person as
Halifax. Halifax saw and acted in the clear light and large relations
in which the great historian of our own times wrote the history of
the Stuarts. Wilberforce was a purer man, who acted more
conscientiously and persistently within his smaller range of life and
thought. It would have been inconsistent with Mr. Choate's nature for
him to have been "wrong-headed" in any direction. Such largeness of
view, such dramatic and interpretative imagination, such volatile
play of thought and fancy, and such perception of the pettiness and
hollowness of nearly all the aims and ambitions of daily life we
cannot expect to find coexisting with the coarser "blood-sympathies,"
the direct passion, and the dogged and tenacious hold of temporary
and smaller objects and issues, which distinguish the American
politician, or with the narrowness of view, the zeal, and the moral
persistency which characterize the practical reformer.
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