ples, that for the most part we can understand only those who are
like ourselves. When a woman comes in with her effusiveness, we are put
out and irritated; when a man whose mind is wholly uneducated utters his
feelings by shouting hymns and dancing on the street, we think him a
semi-lunatic; when a member of our family spends an hour or two a day in
devotional exercises, we condemn it as waste of time which might be
better spent on practical charities or household duties.

Most liable of all to this vice of misjudging the actions of others, and
indeed of misapprehending generally wherein the real value of life
consists, are those who, like Judas, measure all things by a
utilitarian, if not a money, standard. Actions which have no immediate
results are pronounced by such persons to be mere sentiment and waste,
while in fact they redeem human nature and make life seem worth living.
The charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava served none of the
immediate purposes of the battle, and was indeed a blunder and waste
from that point of view; yet are not our annals enriched by it as they
have been by few victories? On the Parthenon there were figures placed
with their backs hard against the wall of the pediment; these backs were
never seen and were not intended to be seen, but yet were carved with
the same care as was spent upon the front of the figures. Was that care
waste? There are thousands of persons in our own society who think it
essential to teach their children arithmetic, but pernicious to instil
into their minds a love of poetry or art. They judge of education by the
test, Will it pay? can this attainment be turned into money? The other
question, Will it enrich the nature of the child and of the man? is not
asked. They proceed as if they believed that the man is made for
business, not business for the man; and thus it comes to pass that
everywhere among us men are found sacrificed to business, stunted in
their moral development, shut off from the deeper things of life. The
pursuits which such persons condemn are the very things which lift life
out of the low level of commonplace buying and selling, and invite us to
remember that man liveth not by bread alone, but by high thoughts, by
noble sacrifice, by devoted love and all that love dictates, by the
powers of the unseen, mightier by far than all that we see.

In the face, then, of so much that runs counter to such demonstrations
as Mary's and condemns them as extra