hearts have no such abounding springs of love; and
thus there is room for the philanthropist; but if
all men were patient, laborious, and affectionate,
the philanthropist’s gifts would find comparatively
little scope for their exercise; there might even be
a queue of benevolent people waiting for admission
to any house where there was sickness or bereavement.
Moreover, all sufferers do not want to be cheered;
they often prefer to be left alone; and to be the compulsory
recipient of the charity you do not require is an additional
burden. A person who is always hungering and
thirsting to exercise a higher influence upon others
is apt to be an unmitigated bore. The thing must
be given if it is required, not poured over people’s
heads, as Aristophanes says, with a ladle. To
be ready to help is a finer quality than to insist
on helping, because, after all, if life is a discipline,
the aim is that we have to find the way out of our
troubles, not that we should be lugged and hauled
through them, “bumped into paths of peace,”
as Dickens says. Just as justice requires to be
tempered by mercy, so energy requires to be tempered
by inaction. But the difficulty is for the indolent,
the dreamy, the fastidious, the loafer, the vagabond.
Energy is to a large extent a question of climate and
temperament. What of the dwellers in a rich and
fertile country, where a very little work will produce
the means of livelihood, and where the temperature
does not require elaborate houses, carefully warmed,
or abundance of conventional clothing? A dweller
in Galilee at the time of the Christian era, a dweller
in Athens at the time of Socrates—it was
possible for each of these to live simply and comfortably
without any great expenditure of labour; does morality
require that one should work harder than one need
for luxuries that one does not want? Neither our
Lord nor Socrates seems to have thought so. Our
Lord himself went about teaching and doing good; but
there is no evidence that he began his work before
he was thirty, and he interposed long spaces of reflection
and solitude. If the Gospel of work were to be
paramount, he would have filled his days with feverish
energy; but from the beginning to the end there is
abundance of texts and incidents which show that he
thought excessive industry rather a snare than otherwise.
He spoke very sternly of the bad effect of riches.
He told his disciples not to labour for perishable
things, not to indulge anxiety about food and raiment,
but to live like birds and flowers; he rebuked a bustling,
hospitable woman—he praised one who preferred
to sit and hear him talk. His whole attitude
was to encourage reflection rather than philanthropy,
to invite people to think and converse about moral
principles rather than to fling themselves into mundane
activities. There is far more justification in
the Gospel for a life of kindly and simple leisure
than there is for what may be called a busy and successful
career. The Christian is taught rather to love
God and to be interested in his neighbour than to
love respectability and to make a fortune. Indeed,
to make a fortune on Christian lines is a thing which
requires a somewhat sophistical defence.