ors and insignificant persons; indulgence where our own claims
only are concerned, but firmness in our demands where they relate to
duties towards others or towards the public.

"For the common people are what we help them to become; their vices are
our vices, gazed upon, envied, and imitated; and if they come back with
all their weight upon us, it is but just.

2. A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own
life, and a willing self-surrender to its control.

3. An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining
selfhood melt down.

4. A shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious
affections, towards "yes, yes," and away from "no," where the claims of
the non-ego are concerned. These fundamental inner conditions have
characteristic practical consequences, as follows:--

a. Asceticism.--The self-surrender may become so passionate as to turn
into self-immolation. It may then so over-rule the ordinary
inhibitions of the flesh that the saint finds positive pleasure in
sacrifice and asceticism, measuring and expressing as they do the
degree of his loyalty to the higher power.

b. Strength of Soul.--The sense of enlargement of life may be so
uplifting that personal motives and inhibitions, commonly omnipotent,
become too insignificant for notice, and new reaches of patience and
fortitude open out. Fears and anxieties go, and blissful equanimity
takes their place. Come heaven, come hell, it makes no difference now!

"We forbid ourselves all seeking after popularity, all ambition to
appear important. We pledge ourselves to abstain from falsehood, in
all its degrees. We promise not to create or encourage illusions as to
what is possible, by what we say or write. We promise to one another
active sincerity, which strives to see truth clearly, and which never
fears to declare what it sees.

"We promise deliberate resistance to the tidal waves of fashion, to the
'booms' and panics of the public mind, to all the forms of weakness and
of fear.

"We forbid ourselves the use of sarcasm. Of serious things we will
speak seriously and unsmilingly, without banter and without the
appearance of banter;--and even so of all things, for there are serious
ways of being light of heart.

"We will put ourselves forward always for what we are, simply and
without false humility, as well as without pedantry, affectation, or
pride."

c. Purity.--The shifting of the emot