ge. He has nothing to say for himself. There are
behind him more than two centuries of his ancestors who have preached
and practiced self-sacrifice, generosity, love. In one sense he is even
enfeebled by his ethical nature. It possesses him, rather than enables
him to clearly and consciously possess it. He feels a certain magnetic
attraction to the fulfilment of a definite purpose; but after all, the
world is full of purposes and of far greater and abler persons than
himself to carry them on; and perhaps this particular appeal is from one
of those "little ones" whom the Christ he holds in reverence bids him
care for first of all. Perhaps the immediate human need should take
precedence over specific work. Perhaps it _is_ a real human need. "Treat
the people as if they were real," said Emerson; "perhaps they are so."
And so he becomes the victim rather than the master of his own diviner
life. He sees through a glass darkly. He is not in the least sure that
he can do any good, but he is fearful he may do evil. And so he espouses
what is really a negative side; a side of blind chance; a mere spiritual
gambling, so to speak, and throws his stakes on the side of what _may_
be useful, as he cannot prove to himself that it is not, and his life
becomes a poor, mean, weak, ineffectual thing. He recalls Sir Hugo's
counsel to Daniel Deronda: "Be courteous, be obliging, Dan; but don't
give yourself over to be melted down for the tallow trade." He becomes
sadly conscious that his entire time, purpose, energies are being
simply, with his own dull consent, "melted down for the tallow trade,"
and that he himself is by way of being on a far more perilous margin
than that of any one of the gently depressed spirits who devastate his
days, and command him to create for them,--not energy, purpose,
will,--but, instead, external conditions in which they may more
luxuriously enjoy their romantic languor and their comforting
consciousness of superior qualities.

Now is it not more than an open question that when temptation assumes
the masque of "service," it is no less temptation, and that it is evil
disguised as good? The woman who reads the infinitely uplifting sermons
of Rev. Doctor Charles G. Ames; who solaces what she is pleased to call
her soul in that marvelously great work, "The Expansion of Religion," by
Rev. Doctor E. Winchester Donald; who is excited--and mistakes it for
being aroused--by Rev. Doctor Philip Moxom's noble book called "T