A Christmas Sermon

Robert Louis Stevenson was a 19th century Scottish essayist, poet, novelist, and travel writer. His most famous works are Kidnapped, Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Treasure Island. An excerpt from this speech on the human condition reads, The idealism of serious people in this age of ours is of a noble character. It never seems to them that they have served enough; they have a fine impatience of their virtues. It were perhaps more modest to be singly thankful that we are no worse. It is not only our enemies, those desperate characters--it is we ourselves who know not what we do; --thence springs the glimmering hope that perhaps we do better than we think: that to scramble through this random business with hands reasonably clean, to have played the part of a man or woman with some reasonable fullness, to have often resisted the diabolic, and at the end to be still resisting it, is for the poor human soldier to have done right well.