of the early Christian himself, who
rushed towards a personal ideal very difficult to sustain. The
visionary who yearns toward an ideal which is practically impossible
is not useless or mischievous, but often the opposite; but the person
who is often useless, and always mischievous, is the visionary who
dreams with the knowledge or the half-knowledge that his ideal is
impossible. The early Christian might be wrong in believing that by
entering the brotherhood men could in a few years become perfect even
as their Father in Heaven was perfect, but he believed it and acted
flatly and fearlessly on the belief: this is the type of the higher
visionary. But all the insidious dangers of the vision; the idleness,
the procrastination, the mere mental aestheticism, come in when the
vision is indulged, as half our Socialistic conceptions are, as a
mere humour or fairy-tale, with a consciousness, half-confessed, that
it is beyond practical politics, and that we need not be troubled
with its immediate fulfilment. The visionary who believes in his own
most frantic vision is always noble and useful. It is the visionary
who does not believe in his vision who is the dreamer, the idler, the
Utopian. This then is the second moral virtue of the older school, an
immense direct sincerity of action, a cleansing away, by the sweats
of hard work, of all those subtle and perilous instincts of mere
ethical castle-building which have been woven like the spells of an
enchantress, round so many of the strong men of our own time.

The third merit, which I have called cheerfulness, is really the
most important of all. We may perhaps put the comparison in this way.
It might strike many persons as strange that in a time on the whole
so optimistic in its intellectual beliefs as this is, in an age when
only a small minority disbelieve in social progress, and a large
majority believe in an ultimate social perfection, there should be
such a tired and blase feeling among numbers of young men. This, we
think, is due, not to the want of an ultimate ideal, but to that of
any immediate way of making for it: not of something to hope but of
something to do. A human being is not satisfied and never will be
satisfied with being told that it is all right: what he wants is not
a prediction of what other people will be hundreds of years hence, to
make him cheerful, b