The children were impressed by this fact.
“Then you mean,” said Ruth, “that universal love is the object of life?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I am afraid to use the word ‘love,’ for it might mean blind love, and I mean understanding love.”
“Of course,” said the children.
“You mean love of mankind?” asked Marian.
“Yes,” I said, “but individual love, too; and perhaps more than both of these.”
“I still believe,” said Ruth, “that progress is only for the individual, and that it doesn’t matter whether we progress here or hereafter. Personal love is selfish. We want divine love.”
I answered her: “I will not speak now of hereafter. But here and now, to-day, do we not want at once the thing that we want?”
“Yes,” they said.
“Then, now and here we mean to go forward, as far as we can, and now and here we will love men with our might, because that is the human way and the human progress.”