But this confusion of terms—this confusion of motives is so growing into the language we speak that words, which once were so priceless, are become like weapons worn out and blunted. There is but little edge left to any words now. They will cut nothing.
And so this spirit of competition is a fetish to-day. We do not speak of having done a thing as well as we can do it, but of having done it better than this man or that.
“I bet you,” says the actor, “I could play that part better than the man who plays it now.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” says the politician, “that the speech I made last Friday wasn’t as good as Disraeli at his best?”
“That last book of mine,” says the writer, “was nearly as good as ‘The Old Curiosity Shop.’ I think myself that the death-scene was better in a way.”
Ah! but if we only did say these things aloud, instead of thinking them in silence. For ’tis only in silence now—as they would understand it in Ireland—that we say what we really mean.
So is it that there creeps this spirit of working by comparison into the soul and tissue of everything we do. Yet you would think, would you not, that the Church had kept herself free of it? But the Church is more eaten away with the spirit of competition than is many a humble labourer, driven to earn his living wage by making his work better than the rest.
Take this story for what it is worth; apply it as you will. It has only one meaning for me.
In Ireland, they call the wandering beggars, who live an itinerant existence, living from one town to another—they call them tinkers. A certain tinker woman, then, came into the city of Cork. Down one of the quays, seeking the scraps that fall in these places, dragging three wretched children at the frayed hem of her skirt, she was seen by a Protestant vicar.
Shifting one bare foot behind the other, she bobbed him a curtesy.