civic and human duty.  And then I would put all those who, in a small sphere, exercise a direct, quiet, simple influence—­and then come the large mass of mankind; people who work faithfully, from instinct and necessity, but without any particular design or desire, except to live honestly, honourably, and respectably, with no urgent sense of the duty of serving others, taking life as it comes, practical individualists, in fact.  No higher than these, but certainly no lower, I should put quiet, contemplative, reflective people, who are theoretical individualists.  They are not very effective people generally, and they have a certain poetical quality; they cannot originate, but they can appreciate.  I look upon all these individualists, whether practical or theoretical, as the average mass of humanity, the common soldiers, so to speak, as distinguished from the officers.  Life is for them a discipline, and their raison d’etre is that of the learner, as opposed to that of the teacher.  To all of them, experience is the main point; they are all in the school of God; they are being prepared for something.  The object is that they should apprehend something, and the channel through which it comes matters little.  They do the necessary work of the world; they support themselves, and they support those who from infirmity, weakness, age, or youth cannot support themselves.  There is room, I think, in the world for both kinds of individualist, though the contemplative individualists are in the minority; and perhaps it must be so, because a certain lassitude is characteristic of them.  If they were in the majority in any nation, one would have a simple, patient, unambitious race, who would tend to become the subjects of other more vigorous nations:  our Indian empire is a case in point.  Probably China is a similar nation, preserved from conquest by its inaccessibility and its numerical force.  Japan is an instance of the strange process of a contemplative nation becoming a practical one.  The curious thing is that Christianity, which is essentially a contemplative, unmilitant, unpatriotic, unambitious force, decidedly oriental in type, should have become, by a mysterious transmutation, the religion of active, inventive, conquering nations.  I have no doubt that the essence of Christianity lies in a contemplative simplicity, and that it is in strong opposition to what is commonly called civilisation.  It aims at improving society through the uplifting of the individual, not at uplifting the individual through social agencies.  We have improved upon that in our latter-day wisdom, for the Christian ought to be inherently unpatriotic, or rather his patriotism ought to be of an all-embracing rather than of an antagonistic kind.  I do not want to make lofty excuses for myself; my own unworldliness is not an abnegation at all, but a deliberate preference for obscurity.  Still I should maintain that the vital and spiritual strength of a nation is measured, not by the activity of its organisations, but by the