eligion. I can see no more reason why
salvation should come to the intellectually incapable than to the
morally incapable. For simple souls thinking in simple processes,
salvation perhaps comes easily, but there is none for the intellectual
coward, for the mental sloven and sluggard, for the stupid and obdurate
mind. The Believer will think hard and continue to grow and learn, to
read and seek discussion as his needs determine.
Correlated with one's own intellectual activity, part of it and growing
out of it for almost everyone, is intellectual work with and upon
others. By teaching we learn. Not to communicate one's thoughts to
others, to keep one's thoughts to oneself as people say, is either
cowardice or pride. It is a form of sin. It is a duty to talk, teach,
explain, write, lecture, read and listen. Every truly religious man,
every good Socialist, is a propagandist. Those who cannot write or
discuss can talk, those who cannot argue can induce people to listen to
others and read. We have a belief and an idea that we want to spread,
each to the utmost of his means and measure, throughout all the world.
We have a thought that we want to make humanity's thought. And it is
a duty too that one should, within the compass of one's ability, make
teaching, writing and lecturing possible where it has not existed
before. This can be done in a hundred ways, by founding and enlarging
schools and universities and chairs, for example; by making print
and reading and all the material of thought cheap and abundant, by
organizing discussion and societies for inquiry.
And talk and thought and study are but the more generalized aspects of
duty. The Believer may find his own special aptitude lies rather
among concrete things, in experimenting and promoting experiments in
collective action. Things teach as well as words, and some of us are
most expressive by concrete methods. The Believer will work himself
and help others to his utmost in all those developments of material
civilization, in organized sanitation for example, all those
developments that force collective acts upon communities and collective
realizations into the minds of men. And the whole field of scientific
research is a field of duty calling to everyone who can enter it, to add
to the permanent store of knowledge and new resources for the race.
The Mind of that Civilized State we seek to make by giving ourselves
into its making, is evidently the central work before u
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