st realise that what he is willing to
give could not be bought.... When he is quite ready, there shall arise
for him, out of the Abstraction, something finished; something as
absolutely his own as the other half of his circle.

The one relentless and continual realisation which drives home to a man
who has any vision of the betterment of the whole, is the low-grade
intelligence of the average human being. Every man who has ever worked
for a day out of himself has met this fierce and flogging truth. The
personal answer to this, which the workman finally makes, may be of
three kinds: He may desert his vision entirely and return to operate
among the infinite small doors of the many--which is cowardice and the
grimmest failure. He may abandon the many and devote himself to the few
who understand; and this opens the way to the subtler and more powerful
devils which beset and betray human understanding, for we are not
heroically moulded by those who love us but by the grinding of those who
revile. If a key does not fit, it must be ground; and to be ground, its
wards made true and sharp, it must be held somehow in a vise. The
grinding from above will not bite otherwise. So it is with the workman.
He must fix himself first in the knowledge of the world....

The workman of the true way abandons neither his vision nor the world.
Somehow to impregnate the world with his particular vision--all good
comes from that. In a word, the workman either plays to world entirely,
which is failure; to his elect entirely, which is apt to be a greater
failure; or, intrenched in the world and thrilling with aspiration, he
may exert a levitating influence upon the whole, just as surely as wings
beat upward. There are days of blindness, and the years are long, but in
this latest struggle a man forgets himself, which is the primary
victory.

The real workman then--vibrating between compassion and contempt--his
body vised in the world, his spirit struggling upward, performs his
task. When suddenly freed, he finds that he has done well. If one is to
have wings, and by that I don't mean feathers but the intrinsic
levitating force of the spiritual life, be very sure they must be grown
here, and gain their power of pinion in the struggle to lift matter.

13

NATURAL CRUELTY

In dealing with the young, especially with little boys, one of the first
things to establish is gentleness to animals. Between the little boy and
the grown man all the