But the artist is free and he works in joy, and to him all things are good and all days are holy.  The great inventors, thinkers, poets, musicians and artists have all been men of deep religious natures; but their religion has never been a formalized, restricted, ossified religion.  They did not worship at set times and places.  Their religion has been a natural and spontaneous blossoming of the intellect and emotions—­they have worked in love, not only one day in the week, but all days, and to them the groves have always and ever been God’s first temples.

Let us work to make men free!  Am I bad because I want to give you freedom, and have you work in gladness instead of fear?

Do not hesitate to work on Sunday, just as you would think good thoughts if the spirit prompts you.  For work is, at the last, only the expression of your thought, and there can be no better religion than good work.

Initiative

The world bestows its big prizes, both in money and honors, for but one thing.  And that is Initiative.  What is Initiative?  I’ll tell you:  It is doing the right thing without being told.  But next to doing the right thing without being told is to do it when you are told once.  That is to say, carry the Message to Garcia!  There are those who never do a thing until they are told twice:  such get no honors and small pay.  Next, there are those who do the right thing only when necessity kicks them from behind, and these get indifference instead of honors, and a pittance for pay.  This kind spends most of its time polishing a bench with a hard-luck story.  Then, still lower down in the scale than this, we find the fellow who will not do the right thing even when some one goes along to show him how, and stays to see that he does it; he is always out of a job, and receives the contempt he deserves, unless he has a rich Pa, in which case Destiny awaits near by with a stuffed club.  To which class do you belong?

The Disagreeable Girl

England’s most famous dramatist, George Bernard Shaw, has placed in the pillory of letters what he is pleased to call “The Disagreeable Girl.”

And he has done it by a dry-plate, quick-shutter process in a manner that surely lays him liable for criminal libel in the assize of high society.

I say society’s assize advisedly, because it is only in society that the Disagreeable Girl can play a prominent part, assuming the center of the stage.  Society, in the society sense, is built upon vacuity; its favors being for those who reveal a fine capacity to waste and consume.  Those who would write their names high on society’s honor roll, need not be either useful or intelligent—­they need only seem.