ing peace. James quotes
in this connection Pascal's _Priere pour bien user les maladies_:

I ask you, neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor for death;
but that you may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life and
my death, for your glory.... You alone know what is expedient
for me; you are the sovereign master; do with me according to your
will. Give to me, or take away from me, only conform my will to
yours. I know but one thing, Lord, that it is good to follow you, and
bad to offend you. Apart from that, I know not what is good or bad
in anything. I know not which is most profitable to me, health or
sickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in the world. That
discernment is beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden
among the secrets of your Providence, which I adore, but do not
seek to fathom.[1]

[Footnote 1: Quoted in James: _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 286.]

Self-surrender, however, takes other forms than religious
absorption or devotion. "Saintliness" is not unknown in
secular forms of life, in the devotion of men to any ideal,
despite pain and privation of worldly goods and successes.
The doctor sacrificing his life in a leper colony is an extreme
example. But something of the same humility and submissiveness
is exhibited every time a man makes a choice which
places the welfare of other people before his own immediate
success. It is shown by the thousands of physicians and
settlement workers and teachers who spend their lives in
patient devotion to labors that bring little remuneration and
as little glory. Men of affairs and a large proportion of other
men generally measure worth by worldly success. But even
from the worldly, such signs of self-surrender elicit admiration.

ECCENTRICS. There is one type of self so various and
miscellaneous that it can only be subsumed under the general
epithet, "eccentric." These are the unexpectedly large number
of individuals in our civilization who do not come under any
of the usual categories, who display some small or great
abnormality which sets them off from the general run of men.
That some of these are accounted eccentric is to be explained
in the light of man's tendency, as a gregarious animal, to
think "queer" and "freakish" anything off the beaten track.
Some are clearly and unmistakably abnormal in some physiological
or psychological respect. From these are recruited
the inmates of our penitentiaries and insane asylums