NON-ACTING IIC
ideal has stood before us for eighteen centuries ; it sliines, to-day, with such intensity that it needs great effort to avoid seeing that all our woes arise from the fact that we do not accept its guidance. But the more difficult it becomes to avoid seeing this, the more some people increase their efforts to persuade us to do as they do : to close our eyes in order not to see. To be quite sure to reach port one must, ai)ove all, throw the compass overboard, say they, and forge ahead. Men of our Christian world are like people who strain themselves with efforts to get rid of some oliject that spoils life for them, but who, in their Imrry, have no time to agree, and all pull in different directions. It would be enough for man to-day to pause in his activity and to reflect — comj)aring the demands of his reason and of his heart with the actual conditions of life — in order to perceive that his whole life and all his actions are in incessant and glaring contradiction to his reason and his heart. Ask each man of our time separately what are the moral bases of his conduct, and they will almost all tell you that they are the principles of Christianity, or at least those of justice. And in saying this they will be sincere. According to their con- sciences, all men should live as Christians ; but see how they behave : they behave like wild beasts. So that for the great majority of men in our Christian worlfl, the organization of their life corresponds, not to their way of perceiving or feeling, but to certain forms once necessary for other people with quite dif- ferent perceptions of life, but existing now merely because the constant bustle men live in allows them no time for reflection.
r.
If in former times (when the evils produced by pagan life were not so evident, and especially when Christian principles were not yet so generally accepted) men were able conscientiously to uphold the servitude of the workers, the oppression of man by man, penal law,
