walk the streets and highways with livid faces. The slums reek with other thousands more utterly degraded than the world's savages. Cellars and garrets are full of children and young people who, after a brief hunger for sweetness and purity, are swept downwards into hopelessness and all moral infamies. No soft-hearted altruism ever reaches this situation. No reformation ever makes a rift in this dark Tartarus. A little higher up-in the treadmills of the industries-are other millions; honest toilers, unconsciously dying an æsthetic and spiritual death. Beyond these in the fields are other millions, worked to the limits of all endurance because their views of life do not include its highest values. What failures, what wreckage, what scudding before adverse winds, what streams of tendencies stronger than men? Is it not possible that this world's life in these Western lands may have moved forward with some of its prime elements of strength and prosperity disastrously underestimated? May it not be so that men are wearing their lives away in pursuit of a game which is not worth the powder and shot? It may be the life of modern civilization itself strikes a dissonant note. Are not men enslaved and killed for no adequate reason and because civil society itself lacks the life vision? As long as men are compelied to exhaust themselves in the crass struggle for bread will the pain of living ever be less? Have not the royal fountains become muddy? Have we not put a first estimate on relative things and a second estimate on absolute values? Is not any civilization fundamentally unwholesome which tends to wean the common mind away from its mothering in a world of absolute spirit? Is not the social viewpoint of life in radical error? How could any active principle be necessary in the personal life and not so in society? Could the lifted vision-the endless motive-apply to the individual and not to society? If the law of spirit values is supreme for the personal life, can it then become a social indifference without disaster? The expenditure of force in the spirit world is not a waste. It thrives on its own outgo. Giving doth not impoverish. Withholding doth not enrich. The more one gives the more one has. A fortune bestowed is a fortune husbanded. Material inheritances may be alienated by others or by one's self. Spirit possessions are secure against invasion. The common honesties— the upright life without ostentation, the practice of the neighborly spirit, generous recognition of the feelings of others, the disinterested motive, the sweet humanities, self-surrender to the world's happiness-the exercise of these virtues are reversals of the law of waste. Wherever they are outwardly co-ordinated in society they constitute an investment in which accumulations are compounded and not drawn upon. Shut-in capacities are starved for lack of use. We need not hesitate to converse or to give out knowledge freely, because there is no loss to the giver. The press is free, and books and libraries, because that kind of outgiving is under the law of intellectual selfexpansion. Everybody is enriched when the truth treasures of the world are possessed by the poorest of the poor. Vast sources of knowledge are now open to all who wish to make use of them; because no sense of limitation or exhaustion is ever felt. The young truth seeker to-day, with his first moment of inquiry, is in reach of these unwasting accumulations. In mathematics, for instance, its language symbols are a great saving to beginners. They start with formulated statements of what the ages have accomplished. The multiplication table, the equations of algebra, the theorems of geometry, logarythms, the dry figures in the almanac are in a vital way inheritances. With them the student performs the very greatest calculations with a very remnant of work. On this kind of storage anybody can draw without any loss to the bins or to the people who filled them. The motives of self-seeking are absent in all the things which we can have without price of the finished labors of others. If we add anything to our spiritual inheritance, we are profited by the use others may make of it. The more they take the richer we are. When we withhold the action of our faculties we impoverish ourselves. When we refuse the investment of a talent we bury it. The world may get along without the use of our powers-we can not. Often what we construct is an evanescence. We are always building ourselves. The building is the builder. This is life's deepest law. It has in it all the elements of permanence. Under its action, the royal self is able to take a part of the substance of all experiences and transmute them into that which the whip of any cosmic wind will not wear away. |