The Thing Is Not Only To Avoid

In A Symbol There Is Concealment And Yet Revelation: Here Therefore, By Silence And By Speech Acting Together, Comes A Double Significance.

Men Are Grown Mechanical In Head And In The Heart, As Well As In The Hand. They Have Lost Faith In Individual Endeavour, And In Natural Force Of Any Kind.

Men Are To Be Guided Only By Their Self-interests. Good Government Is A Good Balancing Of These; And, Except A Keen Eye And Appetite For Self-interest, Requires No Virtue In Any Quarter. To Both Parties It Is Emphatically A Machine: To The Discontented, A Taxing-machine; To The Contented, A Machine For Securing Property. Its Duties And Its Faults Are Not Those Of A Father, But Of An Active Parish-constable.

The Situation That Has Not Its Duty, Its Ideal, Was Never Yet Occupied By Man. Yes, Here, In This Poor, Miserable, Hampered, Despicable Actual, Wherein Thou Even Now Standest, Here Or Nowhere Is Thy Ideal; Work It Out Therefrom, And, Working, Believe, Live, Be Free. Fool! The Ideal Is In Thyself.

He Who Talks Much About Virtue In The Abstract, Begins To Be Suspected; It Is Shrewdly Guessed That Where There Is Great Preaching There Will Be Little Almsgiving.