Part 62

I said again the quotation from St. Augustine: “‘Love God, and do as you please,’ for if you love the good, wholly, you can do only the good.

“Remember,” I said, “that if the contagiously sick are not cared for, we shall all be ill; and, just so, starvation, poverty, sin, hurt each one of us, wherever they be, and must be cured for our own sake. Let us get over the self-righteous, sentimentally virtuous feeling which I fear charity has given many people. For that reason I have always disliked the word ‘charity.’”

“Yes,” said Ruth, “so have I.”

“But the virtuous feeling is very pleasant,” Virginia said.

“Hardly,” I answered, “so sane and sound as the pleasant feeling of helping ourselves, all together.”

“The word ‘charity,’” said Marian, “comes from a Greek word meaning gratitude, the word ‘charis.’”

“I had always thought of it,” I said, “as coming from the Latin ‘carus,’ meaning love. But that is interesting. For gratitude is always a debt paid. And so, I fear, all our charity is a debt partly and never wholly paid. The most that a man can give, being able to give, still leaves him more than his share. And that is why I seldom have the joy untainted, of which Virginia speaks.”

Virginia said it made her glad to see people happy because of her. She said: “Once three of us gave a little boy a ten-cent plaything, and it made him so happy we felt as though we had done something fine.”

Ruth agreed with me that it was impossible to overcome a feeling of personal guilt at the sight of misery.

“You see,” I went on, “that for the rich poverty is as bad as for the poor. Drunkenness and misery ask their price of the rich man.”

“Yes,” said Virginia, “for to see poor and drunken people bothers the rich man.”

“She is quite right,” I said; “poverty does and must bother the rich man, and that is just why he must get rid of it. Wells, the socialist, once said he dared not let any man be sick or poor or miserable, and bring up sick, poor, miserable children, for he could not tell what man’s grandchild would one day marry his grandchild.”

“That is an interesting way of looking at it,” said Marian. “I never thought of that.”

“So you see,” I went on, “we can no more praise ourselves for helping to better the world than we can praise people—except for their good sense and wisdom—when they put up hospitals for contagious diseases, and separate those who suffer from them. Did you ever think of it, that to take care of the weak strengthens the strong? The man who cares for two gets the strength of two.”

Florence asked: “What if there were no weak?” A good question, but an unanswerable one, from lack of experience.

“It is good,” I went on, “to use our powers, to strengthen them; and we can use them only through others. I have heard people say it is foolish for the strong to spend themselves on the weak. To me that seems untrue.”

“Yes,” said Virginia, “what is their strength for, if not to use it!”

“Sparta,” I said, “has left no trace but her history, because she cared only for physical strength, and wasted the strength and power that are in weakness.”

“I wish she had not left her history,” they said, thinking of the hard names.

“Everything leaves history,” sighed Marian.

“We can use all men,” I went on, “and every man does something for us that we cannot do for ourselves. The world is like a vast body, in which hand and head do each its part; and the head shall not despise the hand.”

“I don’t like to think of it in that way,” said Ruth, “to think of different people as different parts of the body, for some would have to be way down at the foot.”

“Oh, Ruth,” I answered, “I believe you are despising the foot! That is because you don’t think well enough of the body. But Florence knows better. She probably thinks her feet the most important part of all. When I spoke of the body, I meant that each part was equally necessary to all the others. But I suppose each one of us here would like to think of himself as a brain-cell.”

“We like to flatter ourselves,” said Henry.

I spoke to them of the modern trend in judging crime and meting punishment. Henry already understood this. We spoke of “homes” instead of prisons, of treating the bad as abortive and undeveloped, as moral idiots and invalids, and of using for our good and their happiness all the powers they possessed. We would hate badness, but not the bad man. How could we? Each one acts according to his desires, and in that sense selfishly; and our character depends on how large we are, how much we desire. The man who wants to be richer than his neighbor will act otherwise than the man who wants to share and enjoy the riches and happiness of all his neighbors, and make the whole world his home. Our desires are the measure of our growth. And some are more developed than others.

“Some are so undeveloped,” said Virginia, “that they seem almost like animals.”

“I wondered why Virginia hadn’t mentioned that sooner,” said Marian.

We went on to the next law, that art must give the impression of truth. How does it apply? I said they must see that the telling of truth was not the whole of true relation.