whole modern scientific organization of charity is a consequence of
the failure of simply giving alms. The whole history of constitutional
government is a commentary on the excellence of resisting evil, and
when one cheek is smitten, of smiting back and not turning the other
cheek also.

You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite
of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with
fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out
vagabonds and swindlers.

And yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to
these hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard-fisted methods exclusively,
were there no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out
afterwards whether he were worthy; no one willing to drown his private
wrongs in pity for the wronger's person; no one ready to be duped many
a time rather than live always on suspicion; no one glad to treat
individuals passionately and impulsively rather than by general rules
of prudence; the world would be an infinitely worse place than it is
now to live in. The tender grace, not of a day that is dead, but of a
day yet to be born somehow, with the golden rule grown natural, would
be cut out from the perspective of our imaginations.

The saints, existing in this way, may, with their extravagances of
human tenderness, be prophetic. Nay, innumerable times they have
proved themselves prophetic. Treating those whom they met, in spite of
the past, in spite of all appearances, as worthy, they have stimulated
them to BE worthy, miraculously transformed them by their radiant
example and by the challenge of their expectation.

From this point of view we may admit the human charity which we find in
all saints, and the great excess of it which we find in some saints, to
be a genuinely creative social force, tending to make real a degree of
virtue which it alone is ready to assume as possible. The saints are
authors, auctores, increasers, of goodness. The potentialities of
development in human souls are unfathomable. So many who seemed
irretrievably hardened have in point of fact been softened, converted,
regenerated, in ways that amazed the subjects even more than they
surprised the spectators, that we never can be sure in advance of any
man that his salvation by the way of love is hopeless. We have no
right to speak of human crocodiles and boa-constrictors as of fixedly
incurable beings. We know not the