A method has been invented, is now traditional, of closing the eyes easily and thoughtlessly to the whole; and we are content to catch that contagion from our predecessors: we eat and drink, we work and play, and stifle the restless questioning that springs up so resolutely in our spaces of solitude here; and what will it do in the immeasurable hereafter?
"When I lived in England I was for a short time the member of a professional circle of men engaged on high educational aims.

They held, so far as any teachers can be said to hold, many futures in their hands.

We know that lives teach more than words; and how did these men set themselves to live?
"First, to perform their work with rigid accuracy: I will do them justice--to do it _perfectly_; but granted that, as speedily as possible: and, their work over, to amuse themselves--literally: to play games that they enjoyed with childish keenness, and fill up all the day with them; to read the papers; to play whist; to smoke in the sun; to get through a certain amount of general reading for conversational purposes, and to gossip about one another and their doings, and talk about their work, in which, it must be confessed, they were enthusiastically interested, only in a gossipy detailed way, amassing incident rather than arriving at principles.

There was only one who was engaged in serious work of a kind involving scientific research, and he forfeited much of his doctrinal and all his social influence thereby; 'A man should stick to his work,' they said, 'not pretend to do one thing while he is thinking about another.' "A low ideal, faithfully carried out, is the most effective; not because the high ideal is high, but because so few are capable of carrying it out; and in that Western world success in aims proposed is the highest that a man can aspire to.
"And suppose we do make ourselves famous, what then?
how do we use our fame?
To make life happier?
It might be so, but is it?
No, for ordinary minds the strain is too strong.

'I will gain fame,' the pure young soul said once, 'as an engine of power, that I may have a platform where men will listen to me;' but the effort of struggling thither has been too much, and once arrived there, what is his object now?
merely to remain there, and among the crowd of pushing selfish figures, that have lost in the fight the very signs of their humanity, _monstrari digito_, to have the gaze of men, to feel somebody.
"All this I throw aside, and go straight to God.