is good, because it restores another kind of proportion; it is like dipping oneself in the seclusion of a monastic cell.  Nowadays the image of the world, with all its sheets of detailed news, all its network of communications, sets too deep a mark upon one’s spirit.  We tend to believe that a man is lost unless he is overwhelmed with occupation, unless, like the conjurer, he is keeping a dozen balls in the air at once.  Such a gymnastic teaches a man alertness, agility, effectiveness.  But it has got to be proved that one was sent into the world to be effective, and it is not even certain that a man has fulfilled the higher law of his being if he has made a large fortune by business.  A sagacious, shrewd, acute man of the world is sometimes a mere nuisance; he has made his prosperous corner at the expense of others, and he has only contrived to accumulate, behind a little fence of his own, what was meant to be the property of all.  I have known a good many successful men, and I cannot honestly say that I think that they are generally the better for their success.  They have often learnt self-confidence, the shadow of which is a good-natured contempt for ineffective people; the shadow, on the other hand, which falls on the contemplative man is an undue diffidence, an indolent depression, a tendency to think that it does not very much matter what any one does.  But, on the other hand, the contemplative man sometimes does grasp one very important fact—­that we are sent into the world, most of us, to learn something about God and ourselves; whereas if we spend our lives in directing and commanding and consulting others, we get so swollen a sense of our own importance, our own adroitness, our own effectiveness, that we forget that we are tolerated rather than needed. it is better on the whole to tarry the Lord’s leisure, than to try impatiently to force the hand of God, and to make amends for His apparent slothfulness.  What really makes a nation grow, and improve, and progress, is not social legislation and organisation.  That is only the sign of the rising moral temperature; and a man who sets an example of soberness, and kindliness, and contentment is better than a pragmatical district visitor with a taste for rating meek persons.

It may be asked, then, do I set myself up as an example in this matter?  God forbid!  I live thus because I like it, and not from any philosophical or philanthropical standpoint.  But if more men were to follow their instincts in the matter, instead of being misled and bewildered by the conventional view that attaches virtue to perspiration, and national vigour to the multiplication of unnecessary business, it would be a good thing for the community.  What I claim is that a species of mental and moral equilibrium is best attained by a careful proportion of activity and quietude.  What happens in the case of the majority of people is that they are so much occupied in the process of acquisition that they have no time