Charity; it is a preacher, an advocate of Christian philanthropy, of true altruism, of which a well-known writer says:[1]
"We hear a great deal of altruism, as it is called, nowadays — the doctrine, in other words, of living entirely for others. This is man's true happiness and peace, his only good — making others happy. And we at once ask, what is this happiness which we are to secure for others — the same kind as our own, or a different kind? Surely the same kind, for we are all men of like nature, more or less. It seems, then, as far as we can catch the idea, that I am to seek true happiness in making others seek their true happiness, making yet others seek their true happiness, and so on without end; and we never learn what that happiness, personal and independent, consists in. We are told that our modern moralists have improved very much on Christianity; that they have interpreted it to itself; that they have discovered the unknown, or at least only half-known, secret of unselfishness, of true benevolence and philanthropy, which Christ was only groping after according to old-world lights. They would take, as an extreme embodiment of a certain egoistic spirit which they deplore in Christianity, St. Simon Stylites, standing year after year on his pillar in the desert, isolated almost ostentatiously (if it be not a contradiction) from all intercourse with his fellow men; intent wholly on his own interior spiritual perfection and on
- ↑ Vide: Another Handful of Myrrh.
