I saw that much of what is called the serious business
of life is simply and solely necessitated by bodily needs, and is really
entirely temporary and trivial, while the real life of the soul, which
underlies it all, stifled and subdued, pent-up uneasily and cramped
unkindly like a bright spring of water under the superincumbent earth,
finds its way at last to the light. On earth we awkwardly divide this
impulse; we speak of the relation of the soul to others and of the
relation of the soul to God as two separate things. We pass over the
words of Christ in the Gospel, which directly contradict this, and which
make the one absolutely dependent on, and conditional on, the other. We
speak of human affection as a thing which may come in between the soul
and God, while it is in reality the swiftest access thither. We speak as
though ambition were itself made more noble, if it sternly abjures all
multiplication of human tenderness. We speak of a life which sacrifices
material success to emotion as a failure and an irresponsible affair.
The truth is the precise opposite. All the ambitions which have their
end in personal prestige are wholly barren; the ambitions which aim at
social amelioration have a certain nobility about them, though they
substitute a tortuous by-path for a direct highway.
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