Probably I should not conscientiously and
deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good
which society demands of me, to save the universe from
annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely
greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it.
If you should ever be betrayed into any of these
philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your
right hand does, for it is not worth knowing." Elsewhere he
returns upon the subject, and explains his meaning thus: "If
I ever DID a man any good in their sense, of course it was
something exceptional and insignificant compared with the
good or evil I am constantly doing by being what I am."
There is a rude nobility, like that of a barbarian king, in
this unshaken confidence in himself and indifference to the
wants, thoughts, or sufferings of others. In his whole works
I find no trace of pity. This was partly the result of
theory, for he held the world too mysterious to be
criticised, and asks conclusively: "What right have I to
grieve who have not ceased to wonder?" But it sprang still
more from constitutional indifference and superiority; and he
grew up healthy, composed, and unconscious from among life's
horrors, like a green bay-tree from a field of battle. It
was from this lack in himself that he failed to do justice to
the spirit of Christ; for while he could glean more meaning
from individual precepts than any score of Christians, yet he
conceived life in such a different hope, and viewed it with
such contrary emotions, that the sense and purport of the
doctrine as a whole seems to have passed him by or left him
unimpressed.
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