good to him.  What kind of a father were the man who, because there could be no merit or desert in doing well, would not give his child a smile or a pleased word when he saw him trying his best?  Would not such acknowledgment from the father be the natural correlate of the child’s behaviour? and what would the father’s smile be but the perfect reward of the child?  Suppose the father to love the child so that he wants to give him everything, but dares not until his character is developed:  must he not be glad, and show his gladness, at every shade of a progress that will at length set him free to throne his son over all that he has?  ‘I am an unprofitable servant,’ says the man who has done his duty; but his lord, coming unexpectedly, and finding him at his post, girds himself, and makes him sit down to meat, and comes forth and serves him.  How could the divine order of things, founded for growth and gradual betterment, hold and proceed without the notion of return for a thing done?  Must there be only current and no tide?  How can we be workers with God at his work, and he never say ‘Thank you, my child’?  Will he take joy in his success and give none?  Is he the husbandman to take all the profit, and muzzle the mouth of his ox?  When a man does work for another, he has his wages for it, and society exists by the dependence of man upon man through work and wages.  The devil is not the inventor of this society; he has invented the notion of a certain degradation in work, a still greater in wages; and following this up, has constituted a Society after his own likeness, which despises work, leaves it undone, and so can claim its wages without disgrace.

If you say, ‘No one ought to do right for the sake of reward,’ I go farther and say, ’No man can do right for the sake of reward.  A man may do a thing indifferent, he may do a thing wrong, for the sake of reward; but a thing in itself right, done for reward, would, in the very doing, cease to be right.’  At the same time, if a man does right, he cannot escape being rewarded for it; and to refuse the reward, would be to refuse life, and foil the creative love.  The whole question is of the kind of reward expected.  What first reward for doing well, may I look for?  To grow purer in heart, and stronger in the hope of at length seeing God.  If a man be not after this fashion rewarded, he must perish.  As to happiness or any lower rewards that naturally follow the first—­is God to destroy the law of his universe, the divine sequence of cause and effect in order to say:  ’You must do well, but you shall gain no good by it; you must lead a dull joyless existence to all eternity, that lack of delight may show you pure’?  Could Love create with such end in view?  Righteousness does not demand creation; it is Love, not Righteousness, that cannot live alone.  The creature must already be, ere Righteousness can put in a claim.  But, hearts and souls there, Love itself, which created for love and joy, presses the demand of Righteousness first.