to others except as they are of
account to him, and except he enjoys them as much as his vices. The
first really important shock that comes to a young man's religious
sentiment in this world is the number of bored-looking people around,
doing right. An absolutely substantial and perfect love is transfigured
selfishness. It is no mere playing with words to say this, nor is it
substituting a comfortable and pleasant doctrine for a strenuous
altruism. If it were as light and graceful an undertaking to have enough
selfishness to go around, to live in the whole of a universe like this,
as it is to slip out of even living in one's self in it, like a mere
shadow or altruist, egoism were superficial enough. As it is, egoism
being terribly or beautifully alive, so far as it goes, is now and
always has been, and always must be the running gear of the spiritual
world--egoism socialised. The first person is what the second and third
persons are made out of. Altruism, as opposed to egoism, except in a
temporary sense, is a contradiction in terms. Unless a man has a life to
identify other lives, with a self which is the symbol through which he
loves all other selves and all other experiences, he is selfish in the
true sense.

With all our Galileos, Agassizes, and Shakespeares, the universe has not
grown in its countless centuries. It has not been getting higher and
wider over us since the human race began. It is not a larger universe.
It is lived in by larger men, more all-absorbing, all-identifying, and
selfish men. It is a universe in which a human being is duly born, given
place with such a self as he happens to have, and he is expected to grow
up to it. Barring a certain amount of wear and tear and a few minor
rearrangements on the outside, it is the same universe that it was in
the beginning, and is now and always will be quite the same universe,
whether a man grows up to it or not. The larger universe is not one that
comes with the telescope. It comes with the larger self, the self that
by reaching farther and farther in, reaches farther and farther out. It
is as if the sky were a splendour that grew by night out of his own
heart, the tent of his love of God spreading its roof over the nature of
things. The greater distance knowledge reaches, the more it has to be
personal, because it has to be spiritual.

The one thing that it is necessary to do in any part of the world to
make any branch of knowledge or deed of mercy, a liv