cheered; they often prefer to be left alone; and to be the compulsory
recipient of the charity you do not require is an additional burden. A
person who is always hungering and thirsting to exercise a higher
influence upon others is apt to be an unmitigated bore. The thing must
be given if it is required, not poured over people's heads, as
Aristophanes says, with a ladle. To be ready to help is a finer quality
than to insist on helping, because, after all, if life is a discipline,
the aim is that we have to find the way out of our troubles, not that
we should be lugged and hauled through them, "bumped into paths of
peace," as Dickens says. Just as justice requires to be tempered by
mercy, so energy requires to be tempered by inaction. But the
difficulty is for the indolent, the dreamy, the fastidious, the loafer,
the vagabond. Energy is to a large extent a question of climate and
temperament. What of the dwellers in a rich and fertile country, where
a very little work will produce the means of livelihood, and where the
temperature does not require elaborate houses, carefully warmed, or
abundance of conventional clothing? A dweller in Galilee at the time of
the Christian era, a dweller in Athens at the time of Socrates--it was
possible for each of these to live simply and comfortably without any
great expenditure of labour; does morality require that one should work
harder than one need for luxuries that one does not want? Neither our
Lord nor Socrates seems to have thought so. Our Lord himself went about
teaching and doing good; but there is no evidence that he began his
work before he was thirty, and he interposed long spaces of reflection
and solitude. If the Gospel of work were to be paramount, he would have
filled his days with feverish energy; but from the beginning to the end
there is abundance of texts and incidents which show that he thought
excessive industry rather a snare than otherwise. He spoke very sternly
of the bad effect of riches. He told his disciples not to labour for
perishable things, not to indulge anxiety about food and raiment, but