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There is a page in the story Mr. Standfast which makes bracing reading in windy weather. It helps to toughen fiber. Dick Hannay, so the tale runs, has a letter from his friend Peter Pienaar, who was having a stiff fight with himself. He was trying to keep his courage going in face of the bitterest trial he could be called on to face, a crippled old age.
He writes first of ordinary bravery, “I mean by being brave, playing the game by the right rules without letting it worry you that you may very likely get knocked on the head.” That kind of courage, he says, is only good nerves and experience. “But the big courage is the cold-blooded kind, the kind that never lets go even when you’re feeling empty inside, and your blood’s thin, and there’s no kind of fun or profit to be had, and the trouble’s not over in an hour or two but lasts for months and years. One of the men here was speaking about that kind and he called it ‘Fortitude.’ I reckon fortitude’s the biggest thing a man can have—just to go on enduring when there’s no guts or heart left in you.” And Peter went on enduring, nourished upon the strong meat he found in his two only books, his Bible and his Pilgrim’s Progress; and he wins through and makes a gallant end. But his friend does not see that end, “for my eyes were blinded and I was on my knees.”
There are certain winds of adversity which can wither every green thing and tear up every rooted thing (unless there be this fortitude), and there is no choice about whether those winds shall blow or not: “For the love of God thou oughtest to suffer all things, labors, and sorrows, temptations, vexations, anxieties, necessities, infirmities, wrongs, obloquies, reprehensions, humiliations, confusions, corrections, and despites. These things helpeth to virtue, these prove the knight of Christ, these make the heavenly crown.”