I said again the quotation from St. Augustine: “‘Love God, and do as you please,’ for if you love the good, wholly, you can do only the good.
“Remember,” I said, “that if the contagiously sick are not cared for, we shall all be ill; and, just so, starvation, poverty, sin, hurt each one of us, wherever they be, and must be cured for our own sake. Let us get over the self-righteous, sentimentally virtuous feeling which I fear charity has given many people. For that reason I have always disliked the word ‘charity.’”
“Yes,” said Ruth, “so have I.”
“But the virtuous feeling is very pleasant,” Virginia said.
“Hardly,” I answered, “so sane and sound as the pleasant feeling of helping ourselves, all together.”
“The word ‘charity,’” said Marian, “comes from a Greek word meaning gratitude, the word ‘charis.’”
“I had always thought of it,” I said, “as coming from the Latin ‘carus,’ meaning love. But that is interesting. For gratitude is always a debt paid. And so, I fear, all our charity is a debt partly and never wholly paid. The most that a man can give, being able to give, still leaves him more than his share. And that is why I seldom have the joy untainted, of which Virginia speaks.”
Virginia said it made her glad to see people happy because of her. She said: “Once three of us gave a little boy a ten-cent plaything, and it made him so happy we felt as though we had done something fine.”
Ruth agreed with me that it was impossible to overcome a feeling of personal guilt at the sight of misery.
“You see,” I went on, “that for the rich poverty is as bad as for the poor. Drunkenness and misery ask their price of the rich man.”