he
Religion of Hope;" or who entertains similar emotions over recent new
and great and uplifting books by Rev. Doctor George A. Gordon or Rev.
Doctor Lyman Abbott, or many another, often evolves the pleasing fantasy
that all she requires for producing the same quality of work is the
illumination of personal interviews or personal correspondence with
them. "Surely," she reasons, "these men are servants of the Lord, and I
am one of the least of these whose needs they are divinely commanded to
serve. Is not the life more than meat? Should not the minister break off
his morning meditation--an abstract thing, at best--to see me, who needs
an immediate infusion of encouragement?"

And the tragedy of this is that the worker, who is true to his own
purpose,--through good report or through ill report,--to the duties he
is divinely commissioned to perform, is not infrequently entirely
misunderstood. The woman who sends him a voluminous manuscript,
accompanying pretty phrasings regarding his work, and modestly
requesting that he shall read it, give his "views" on it, and decide
just what editor or publisher will be rejoiced to issue it,--and who
receives her pages of outpouring back by return mail with a note,
however courteous, expressing his inability to fulfil this
commission,--this woman becomes, as a rule, the enemy of the person who
declines to be "melted down for the tallow trade." She may do no
particular harm, but the antagonism is there. This, however, could be
borne; but the nature sensitive to shades of human need is always liable
to torture itself because of any failure to meet a specific demand. And
this torture is disintegrating to that force of positive energy which a
special work requires.

Is there not, then, a need for the gospel of one's own endeavor? that a
given line of work, plainly revealed in hours of mystic communion with
the Divine, indicated by the subtle trend of circumstance and
condition,--is there not a need of realizing so clearly that it is the
duty apportioned to the one fitted for it, that it shall inspire
fidelity and reverence,--even at the risk of what the unthinking may
describe as selfish absorption? For there are vast varieties of
ministering for ministering spirits. The work of the social settlement
is divine; but the poet and the painter, if they produce poems and
paintings, cannot devote their time to its work. And the poems and the
pictures have their value, as well as service in giv