68. Let us be ready to offer, when necessity beckons, our wealth,
and our time, and our life, to our less fortunate brethren, making
them thus an exceptional gift of a few exceptional hours; but the
sage is not bound to neglect his happiness, and all that environs
his life, in sole preparation for these few exceptional hours of
greater or lesser devotion. The truest morality tells us to cling,
above all, to the duties that return every day, to acts of
inexhaustible brotherly kindness. And, thus considered, we find that
in the everyday walk of life the solitary thing we can ever
distribute among those who march by our side, be they joyful or sad,
is the confidence, strength, the freedom and peace, of our soul. Let
the humblest of men, therefore, never cease to cherish and lift up
his soul, even as though he were fully convinced that this soul of
his should one day be called to console or gladden a God. When we
think of preparing our soul, the preparation should never be other
than befits a mission divine. In this domain only, and on this
condition, can man truly give himself, can there be pre-eminent
sacrifice. And think you that when the hour sounds the gift of a
Socrates or Marcus Aurelius--who lived many lives, for many a time
had they compassed their whole life around--do you think such a gift
is not worth a thousand times more than what would be given by him
who had never stepped over the threshold of consciousness? And if
God there be, will He value sacrifice only by the weight of the
blood in our body; and the blood of the heart--its virtue, its
knowledge of self, its moral existence--do you think this will all
go for nothing?

69. It is not by self-sacrifice that loftiness comes to the soul;
but as the soul becomes loftier, sacrifice fades out of sight, as
the flowers in the valley disappear from the vision of him who toils