"
"You are a bold preacher!" said the earl. "--Suppose now a man was
unconscious of any ability to do the thing required of him?"
"I should say there was the more need he should do the thing."
"That is nonsense."
"If it be nonsense, the nonsense lies in the supposition that a man
can be conscious of not possessing a power; he can only be not
conscious of possessing it, and that is a very different thing. How
is a power to be known but by being a power, and how is it to be a
power but in its own exercise of itself? There is more in man than
he can at any given moment be conscious of; there is life, the power
of the eternal behind his consciousness, which only in action can he
make his own; of which, therefore, only in action, that is
obedience, can he become conscious, for then only is it his."
"You are splitting a hair!"
"If the only way to life lay through a hair, what must you do but
split it? The fact, however, is, that he who takes the live sphere
of truth for a flat intellectual disc, may well take the disc's edge
for a hair."
"Come, come! how does all this apply to me--a man who would really
like to make up his mind about the thing, and is not at the moment
aware of any very pressing duty that he is neglecting to do?"
"Is your lordship not aware of some not very pressing duty that you
are neglecting to do? Some duties need but to be acknowledged by the
smallest amount of action, to become paramount in their demands upon
us.
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