die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man,' says Emerson, 'than an act
of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people.
Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry,
their passions a quotation. Christ was not merely the supreme
individualist, but he was the first individualist in history.
People have tried to make him out an ordinary philanthropist, or
ranked him as an altruist with the scientific and sentimental. But
he was really neither one nor the other. Pity he has, of course,
for the poor, for those who are shut up in prisons, for the lowly,
for the wretched; but he has far more pity for the rich, for the
hard hedonists, for those who waste their freedom in becoming
slaves to things, for those who wear soft raiment and live in
kings' houses. Riches and pleasure seemed to him to be really
greater tragedies than poverty or sorrow. And as for altruism, who
knew better than he that it is vocation not volition that
determines us, and that one cannot gather grapes of thorns or figs
from thistles?

To live for others as a definite self-conscious aim was not his
creed. It was not the basis of his creed. When he says, 'Forgive
your enemies,' it is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one's
own sake that he says so, and because love is more beautiful than
hate. In his own entreaty to the young man, 'Sell all that thou
hast and give to the poor,' it is not of the state of the poor that
he is thinking but of the soul of the young man, the soul that
wealth was marring. In his view of life he is one with the artist
who knows that by the inevitable law of self-perfection, the poet
must sing, and the sculptor think in bronze, and the painter make
the world a mirror for his moods, as surely and as certainly as the
hawthorn must blossom in spring, and the corn turn to gold at