Christian teachers pursue wealth and preferment, indulge ambition, seek
the society of the respectable, practise pharisaical virtues, we are
not likely to draw much nearer to the ideals of Christ.




VI


There is one step of supreme importance from which a man must not
shrink, however difficult it may seem to be; and that is to search and
probe the depths of his soul, that he may find out what it is that he
really and deeply and whole-heartedly and instinctively loves and
admires and desires. Without this first step no progress is possible or
conceivable, because whatever external revelations of God there may be,
through nature, through beauty, through work, through love, there is
always a direct and inner revelation from God to every individual soul;
and, strange as it may appear, this is not always easy to discern,
because of the influences, the ideas, the surroundings that have been
always at work upon us, moulding us, for good and for evil, from our
earliest days. We have been told that we ought to admire this and
desire that, until very often our own inspiration, our true life, has
been clumsily obscured. All these conventional beliefs we must discard;
we may indeed resolve that it is better in some cases to comply with
them to a certain extent for the sake of tranquillity, if they are
widely accepted in the society in which we live; that is to say, we may
decide to abstain from certain things which we do not believe to be
wrong, because the world regards them as being wrong, and because to be
misunderstood in such things may damage our relations with others.