Who has not felt the radiancy of the miserliness of some men and women! Those who would "squeeze the eagle on a penny until the poor bird screams."
In his Tom Brown at Rugby, Hughes shows that Arnold always radiated his full appreciation of all the good in all the boys under his care. Maud Ballington Booth is a wonderful illustration of training to perceive the good radiancies in men and women in whom most others can see and feel only evil.
Is not this a quality of soul to be highly desired? How beautiful, how helpful, how comforting to others long used to feeling that only the evil of them is radiated to others, to feel the sympathy of a large-hearted, pure, beautiful soul which has responded to the weak radiancies of the good that struggles for life within.
For, just as I have shown elsewhere that we must be alert to receive the radiancies of animate and inanimate nature, so must we be receptive to that which our fellow beings radiate. We should train ourselves in receptiveness to that which is good. All prejudice, narrowness, conceit, over self-confidence, cocksureness, tend to ward off the good radiancies of others. There are odors so subtle that the olfactory nerves of most people are incapable of recognizing them. There are notes so refined that ordinary ears cannot hear them, and we are all familiar with the fact that there are infinite depths of space that the largest telescopes fail to penetrate. The expert violinist cherishes his sense of touch that he may not vitiate his playing, and the engraver, the watchmaker, and the workers in a score and one other trades cultivate and preserve high sensitiveness of touch in order that they may become more expert. The piano tuner's ear recognizes variations in the vibrations of the strings he is tuning that most of us fail to appreciate, and the ear of a Theodore Thomas, Carl Muck, Charles Halle, or any other masterly conductor, recognizes fine shades of expression, harmony, and tastefulness in the playing of an orchestra that but few can appreciate. Browning in Rabbi Ben Ezra speaks of things that God takes note of in measuring the man's account that men ignore:
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure;
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act.
All I could never be,
All men ignored in me,