‘No’ to its eager impulses, it halts upon its pilgrimage.  Some of the most grievous and shameful lives on earth have been fruitful enough in reality.  The reason why we mourn and despond over them is, again, that we limit our hope to the single life.  There is time for everything; we must not be impatient.  We must despair of nothing and of no one; the true life consists not in what a man’s reason approves or disapproves, not in what he does or says, but in what he sees.  It is useless to explain things to souls; they must experience them to apprehend them.  The one treachery is to speak of mistakes as irreparable, and of sins as unforgivable.  The sin against the Spirit is to doubt the Spirit, and the sin against life is not to use it generously and freely; we are happiest if we love others well enough to give our life to them; but it is better to use life for ourselves than not to use it at all.”

VII

One day I said to Amroth, “Are there no rules of life here?  It seems almost too good to be true, not to be found fault with and censured and advised and blamed.”

“Oh,” said Amroth, laughing, “there are plenty of rules, as you call them; but one feels them, one is not told them; it is like breathing and seeing.”

“Yes,” I replied, “yet it was like that, too, in the old days; the misery was when one suddenly discovered that when one was acting in what seemed the most natural way possible, it gave pain and concern to some one whom one respected and even loved.  One knew that one’s action was not wrong, and yet one desired to please and satisfy one’s friends; and so one fell back into conventional ways, not because one liked them but because other people did, and it was not worth while making a fuss—­it was a sort of cowardice, I suppose?”

“Not quite,” said Amroth; “you were more on the right lines than the people who interfered with you, no doubt; but of course the truth is that our principles ought to be used, like a stick, to support ourselves, not like a rod to beat other people with.  The most difficult people to teach, as you will see hereafter, are the self-righteous people, whose lives are really pure and good, but who allow their preferences about amusements, occupations, ways of life, to become matters of principle.  The worst temptation in the world is the habit of influence and authority, the desire to direct other lives and to conform them to one’s own standard.  The only way in which we can help other people is by loving them; by frightening another out of something which he is apt to do and of which one does not approve, one effects absolutely nothing:  sin cannot be scared away; the spirit must learn to desire to cast it away, because it sees that goodness is beautiful and fine; and this can only be done by example, never by precept.”

“But it is the entire absence of both that puzzles me here,” I said.  “Nothing to do and a friend to talk to; it’s a lazy business, I think.”