rtaken to
accomplish; and hence they have as little right to regard themselves as
men of art and science, as a corrupt priesthood, which does not fulfil
the obligations which it has assumed, has the right to regard itself as
the bearer of divine truth.

And it can be understood why the makers of the present arts and sciences
have not fulfilled, and cannot fulfil, their vocation. They do not
fulfil it, because out of their obligations they have erected a right.

Scientific and artistic activity, in its real sense, is only fruitful
when it knows no rights, but recognizes only obligations. Only because
it is its property to be always thus, does mankind so highly prize this
activity. If men really were called to the service of others through
artistic work, they would see in that work only obligation, and they
would fulfil it with toil, with privations, and with self-abnegation.

The thinker or the artist will never sit calmly on Olympian heights, as
we have become accustomed to represent them to ourselves. The thinker or
the artist should suffer in company with the people, in order that he may
find salvation or consolation. Besides this, he will suffer because he
is always and eternally in turmoil and agitation: he might decide and say
that that which would confer welfare on men, would free them from
suffering, would afford them consolation; but he has not said so, and has
not presented it as he should have done; he has not decided, and he has
not spoken; and to-morrow, possibly, it will be too late,--he will die.
And therefore suffering and self-sacrifice will always be the lot of the
thinker and the artist.

Not of this description will be the thinker and artist who is reared in
an establishment where, apparently, they manufacture the learned man or
the artist (but in point of fact, they manufacture destroyers of science
and of art), who receives a diploma and a certificate, who would be glad
not to think and not to express that which is imposed on his soul, but
who cannot avoid doing that to which two irresistible forces draw him,--an
inward prompting, and the demand of men.

There will be no sleek, plump, self-satisfied thinkers and artists.
Spiritual activity, and its expression, which are actually necessary to
others, are the most burdensome of all man's avocations; a cross, as the
Gospels phrase it. And the sole indubitable sign of the presence of a
vocation is self-devotion, the sacrifice of self for the m