Principle Over Policy

Anticipating a 14-hour flight to Australia, I looked for some good reading to help me while away the hours of incarceration in a Boeing 747. I decided on James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. (Right about now, someone is saying, "Couldn't he have found something more relevant than that ancient text?")

Shortly after take-off, I settled into my seat in row 51 and dug out Cooper's literary classic. My father grew up in the area of New York state where Cooper's tale takes place. The topography of the land with its setting in the Lake George region was fresh in my mind, as I had just spoken at a Prime Time event in Schroon Lake, New York, just north of the lake Cooper calls "Horican."

As I plowed through the archaic English, obscure turns of speech, and the ever-present flamboyance of editorial style from that period, I ran across a thought provoking section in chapter 18. Describing the French General Montcalm, who led the battle for Fort William Henry during the French and Indian War, Cooper's antique prose unearthed a gem:

And thousands who know that Montcalm died like a hero on the plains of Abraham, have yet to learn how much he was deficient in that moral courage without which no man can be truly great. Pages might be written to prove, from this illustrious example, the defects of human excellence; to show how easy it is for generous sentiments, high courtesy, and chivalrous courage, to lose their influence beneath the chilling blight of selfishness, and to exhibit to the world a man who was great in all the minor attributes of character, but who was found wanting when it became necessary to prove how much principle is superior to policy.

Perhaps our world needs such reminders from time to time.

David J. Felter, editor-in-chief

Holiness Today, January/February 2006

Please note: This article was originally published in 2006. All facts, figures, and titles were accurate to the best of our knowledge at that time but may have since changed.