June 3, 1890.
I do not want, even in my thoughts, to put the contemplative life above the practical life. Highest of all I would put a combination of the two—a man of high and clear ideals, in a position where he was able to give them shape—a great constructive statesman, a great educator, a great man of business, who was also keenly alive to social problems, a great philanthropist. Next to these I would put great thinkers, moralists, poets—all who inspire. Then I would put the absolutely effective instruments of great designs—legislators, lawyers, teachers, priests, doctors, writers—men without originality, but with a firm conception of civic and human duty. And then I would put all those who, in a small sphere, exercise a direct, quiet, simple influence—and then come the large mass of mankind; people who work faithfully, from instinct and necessity, but without any particular design or desire, except to live honestly, honourably, and respectably, with no urgent sense of the duty of serving others, taking life as it comes, practical individualists, in fact. No higher than these, but certainly no lower, I should put quiet, contemplative, reflective people, who are theoretical individualists. They are not very effective people generally, and they have a certain poetical quality; they cannot originate, but they can appreciate. I look upon all these individualists, whether practical or theoretical, as the average mass of humanity, the common soldiers, so to speak, as distinguished from the officers. Life is for them a discipline, and their raison d'etre is that of the learner, as opposed to that of the teacher. To all of them, experience is the main point; they are all in the school of God; they are being prepared for something. The object is that they should apprehend something, and the channel through which it comes matters little. They do the necessary work of the world; they support themselves, and they support those who from infirmity, weakness, age, or youth cannot support themselves. There is room, I think, in the world for both kinds of individualist, though the contemplative individualists are in the minority; and perhaps it must be so, because a certain lassitude is characteristic of them. If they were in the majority in any nation, one would have a simple, patient, unambitious race, who would tend to become the subjects of other more vigorous nations: our Indian empire is a case in point. Probably China is a similar nation, preserved from conquest by its inaccessibility and its numerical force. Japan is an instance of the strange process of a contemplative nation becoming a practical one. The curious thing is that Christianity, which is essentially a contemplative, unmilitant, unpatriotic, unambitious force, decidedly oriental in type, should have become, by a mysterious transmutation, the religion of active, inventive, conquering nations. I have no doubt that the essence of Christianity lies in a contemplative simplicity, and that it is in strong opposition to what is commonly called civilisation. It aims at improving society through the uplifting of the individual, not at uplifting the individual through social agencies. We have improved upon that in our latter-day wisdom, for the Christian ought to be inherently unpatriotic, or rather his patriotism ought to be of an all-embracing rather than of an antagonistic kind. I do not want to make lofty excuses for myself; my own unworldliness is not an abnegation at all, but a deliberate preference for obscurity. Still I should maintain that the vital and spiritual strength of a nation is measured, not by the activity of its organisations, but by the number of quiet, simple, virtuous, and high-minded persons that it contains. And thus, in my own case, though the choice is made for me by temperament and circumstances, I have no pricking of conscience on the subject of my scanty activities. It is not mere activity that makes the difference. The danger of mere activity is that it tends to make men complacent, to lead them to think that they are following the paths of virtue, when they are only enmeshed in conventionality. The dangers of the quiet life are indolence, morbidity, sloth, depression, unmanliness; but I think that it develops humility, and allows the daily and hourly message of God to sink into the soul. After all, the one supreme peril is that of self-satisfaction and finality. If a man is content with what he is, there is nothing to make him long for what is higher. Any one who looks around him with a candid gaze, becomes aware that our life is and must be a provisional one, that it has somehow fallen short of its possibilities. To better it is the best of all courses; but next to that it is more desirable that men should hope for and desire a greater harmony of things, than that they should acquiesce in what is so strangely and sadly amiss.