occupations, their food, their whole social arrangements; and all in
vain.

I should answer, in all courtesy and humility--for I sympathise deeply
with such men and women, and respect them deeply likewise--But are not
people discontented already, from the lowest to the highest? And ought a
man, in such a piecemeal, foolish, greedy, sinful world as this is, and
always has been, to be anything but discontented? If he thinks that
things are going all right, must he not have a most beggarly conception
of what going right means? And if things are not going right, can it be
anything but good for him to see that they are not going right? Can
truth and fact harm any human being? I shall not believe so, as long as
I have a Bible wherein to believe. For my part, I should like to make
every man, woman, and child whom I meet discontented with themselves,
even as I am discontented with myself. I should like to awaken in them,
about their physical, their intellectual, their moral condition, that
divine discontent which is the parent, first of upward aspiration and
then of self-control, thought, effort to fulfil that aspiration even in
part. For to be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be
ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and first upgrowth of all
virtue. Men begin at first, as boys begin when they grumble at their
school and their schoolmasters, to lay the blame on others; to be
discontented with their circumstances--the things which stand around
them; and to cry, "Oh that I had this!" "Oh that I had that!" But that
way no deliverance lies. That discontent only ends in revolt and
rebellion, social or political; and that, again, still in the same
worship of circumstances--but this time desperate--which ends, let it
disguise itself under what fine names it will, in what the old Greeks
called a tyranny; in which--as in the Spanish republics of America, and
in France more than once--all have become the voluntary slaves of one