Christian Courage: The Cost of Righteousness

Be ye therefore very courageous.—On Christian courage: In your relation with fellow-creatures and intercourse with the world, it requires much courage and resolution to be sturdily upright and just. When your interest, your feelings, your wants, nay, even your future independence are on one side, and the plain dictates of duty and religion on the other, then it is that you must "be very courageous" and not turn aside therefrom to the right hand or to the left.

The trial consists in preferring the praise of Elohim and the approval of conscience—with loss, disgrace, derision, and even poverty for life—to the mean and dishonest acquirement of worldly good. Courage is requisite even in doing good. Good actions may cost us much trouble and expense, much opposition, much vexation, and misrepresentation. We may encounter resistance from the indolent and selfish, the thwarting malignity of envy, the sneers of the niggardly who slander those who shame them to charity, and the unkind constructions of the worldly who never attribute disinterested motives to prominence in well-doing.

Courage is required to forgive injuries and endure wrongs, as well as to ask forgiveness and make reparation. The Christian must do both when necessary. Courage is demanded in maintaining truth and sincerity—not merely avoiding flagrant falsehood, but acquiring habits of open and frank avowal of our minds. No deference to rank or circumstances, no timidity or desire to ingratiate, must prevent our bold reprobation of what is decidedly wrong.