es in
their hands. We know that lives teach more than words; and how did
these men set themselves to live?

"First, to perform their work with rigid accuracy: I will do them
justice--to do it _perfectly_; but granted that, as speedily as
possible: and, their work over, to amuse themselves--literally: to
play games that they enjoyed with childish keenness, and fill up all
the day with them; to read the papers; to play whist; to smoke in
the sun; to get through a certain amount of general reading for
conversational purposes, and to gossip about one another and their
doings, and talk about their work, in which, it must be confessed,
they were enthusiastically interested, only in a gossipy detailed
way, amassing incident rather than arriving at principles. There
was only one who was engaged in serious work of a kind involving
scientific research, and he forfeited much of his doctrinal and all
his social influence thereby; 'A man should stick to his work,' they
said, 'not pretend to do one thing while he is thinking about
another.'

"A low ideal, faithfully carried out, is the most effective; not
because the high ideal is high, but because so few are capable of
carrying it out; and in that Western world success in aims proposed
is the highest that a man can aspire to.

"And suppose we do make ourselves famous, what then? how do we use
our fame? To make life happier? It might be so, but is it? No, for
ordinary minds the strain is too strong. 'I will gain fame,' the pure
young soul said once, 'as an engine of power, that I may have a
platform where men will listen to me;' but the effort of struggling
thither has been too much, and once arrived there, what is his
object now? merely to remain there, and among the crowd of pushing
selfish figures, that have lost in the fight the very signs of their
humanity, _monstrari digito_, to have the gaze of men, to feel
somebody.

"All this I throw aside, and go straight to God. All around us in
natural things--in the curve of that rose-stem and the passionate
flush of its petals--in those white bells there, looking as if blown
out of veined foam--in the luscious scents that wind and linger
round the garden, He has set, as in a language, the secrets of His
being and ours, of our why and wherefore, if we could but read them.
Like the characters and monuments of a bygone age staring from a
waste of sand or the front of a precipice, these words and phrases
seem to say, not 'There was a