he
object-lesson, is NOT the one thing needful; and it is better that a
life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its
efforts to remain unspotted.

Proceeding onwards in our search of religious extravagance, we next
come upon excesses of Tenderness and Charity. Here saintliness has to
face the charge of preserving the unfit, and breeding parasites and
beggars. "Resist not evil," "Love your enemies," these are saintly
maxims of which men of this world find it hard to speak without
impatience. Are the men of this world right, or are the saints in
possession of the deeper range of truth?

No simple answer is possible. Here, if anywhere, one feels the
complexity of the moral life, and the mysteriousness of the way in
which facts and ideals are interwoven.

Perfect conduct is a relation between three terms: the actor, the
objects for which he acts, and the recipients of the action. In order
that conduct should be abstractly perfect, all three terms, intention,
execution, and reception, should be suited to one another. The best
intention will fail if it either work by false means or address itself
to the wrong recipient. Thus no critic or estimator of the value of
conduct can confine himself to the actor's animus alone, apart from the
other elements of the performance. As there is no worse lie than a
truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments,
challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are
folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
The saint may simply give the universe into the hands of the enemy by
his trustfulness. He may by non-resistance cut off his own survival.

Herbert Spencer tells us that the perfect man's conduct will appear
perfect only when the environment is perfect: to no inferior
environment is it suitably adapted. We may paraphrase this by
cordially admitting that saintly conduct would be the most perfect
conduct conceivable in an environment where all were saints already;
but by adding that in an environment where few are saints, and many the
exact reverse of saints, it must be ill adapted. We must frankly
confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical
prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of
sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been,
manifested in excess.

The powers of darkness have systematically taken advantage of them.
The