5. We give not as people who find the world so pitiable, so miserable that we want to diminish its misery. We give as people who find the world so glorious, so overflowing, in what it has done for us, that we want to even up, to pay out. We want to share our enthusiasms. Pity led Schopenhauer to pessimism. He pitied the world so much that he thought everybody ought to get out of it by suicide. Pity therefore does not necessarily lead us to social work.
But if we admire anybody, that fact gives us a duty to get our admiration over to somebody, to share our enthusiasm. The whole of a Christian's duty might be phrased as the duty to share his sense of the beauty and the wonder that is in Jesus Christ. Almost the only act that we can be sure will be of use in the world is the act of sharing what enthusiasm we have.
6. But this cannot be done without some care to shape it, without some labor to put it in a form in which somebody else will understand this sense of our admiration or gratitude. Without form and study to give it form, our enthusiasm is mere noise and good spirits. As I have described the fund of energy which comes into us, is felt as gratitude and then pours out of us in social work, one may have wondered, where does man's individual will and choice come in? Where does he begin and these tumultuous energies stop? What is he?
He is that which focusses, that which forms, which makes comprehensible, which expresses the energies that have been given him as a free gift. And because miraculously he is made new—for everything that is new is a miracle—because miraculously he is different from every human being that ever was, so different from all others is the gift that he has to give. I think it is sometimes comforting to look at a finger-print. One gets doubtful whether there is any special reason that the individual called by one's name should persist on top of the earth. Then it is well to go back to simple, elemental facts like finger-prints, with the pretty nearly irresistible conclusion that the rest of our body and soul must be as unique as that, and so possesses something as original to contribute to the world. I have no doubt that there is waiting for each of us to-day a job much more individual than we have ever yet done.
Although, then, we can rightly give in social work merely as people who pass on to others in gratitude and wonder the energies which create our bodies and our souls, yet we can be perfectly sure that if we do what it is up to us to do, we shall in time be giving as people never gave before and never will again. We have missed rare chances in social work unless through presence of mind we find our chance to express differently from what we have ever heard it expressed before that which we feel pushing in us to get out.
7. Since it is our business to give as people who pass on, we want if we can to make it clear sooner or later to the people to whom we pass it on, that we know this. Then they will feel no shame in taking since they know that they do not take from us. There will be no sense that a higher being is distributing what a lower being has to take, if we make it clear that we are sharing that which it is uncomfortable not to share. We are sharing that which we share because in view of all the bounty which we have received, in view of the beauty which has struck us dumb, in view of the flood of affection that we never have answered, we know what to do next. We know that we are branches of a vine, and that the sap of that vine can flow out in us and through us to other tendrils.
THE END
The Riverside Press