Life’s Little 
 
 Pitfalls 
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By the Same Author 
 
 
 
 Sex and Common Sense 
 Prayer as a Force 
 Political Christianity 
 Beauty in Religion 
 
 The Friendship of God 
 Christ Triumphant 
 Life’s Little Pitfalls 
 
Diese Li ETM EVE LiP ADS 
 

 
Life’s Little Pitfalls 
 
 By } 
 A. Maude Royden 
 
 Author of ‘‘ Sex and Common Sense,”’ 
 ‘* Christ Triumphant,”’ etc. 
 
 G.P. Putnam's Sons 
 New York 8 London 
 The Rnickerbocker Press 
 1925 
 
 
 
Copyright, 1925 
 by 
 A. Maude Royden 
 
 
 
 Made in the United States of America 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 YOuTH 
 
 MIDDLE AGE 
 
 OLD AGE 
 
 On BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 
 _ ON BEING A FAILURE . 
 
 Easy WAYS OF BEING GOOD 
 TEMPERAMENT 
 
 LONELY PEOPLE . 
 
 On SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 
 
 On MAKING GOOD RESOLUTIONS . 
 
 105 
 124 
 
 143 
 
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LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 

 
LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 YOUTH 
 
 WE are always inclined to remind the young 
 
 that the world is at a crisis in its history; 
 that humanity is making a great choice; and that 
 upon them a great deal depends. Of course it is 
 true, but as a matter of fact, it is always true. 
 Each crisis looks portentous, but it is not any 
 more portentous than it always was. Every new 
 generation has the chance of making the world 
 over, and every new generation is faced with a 
 great choice, and those words of Rupert Brooke 
 which, applied to the world of 1914, come to us 
 now with something almost of irony, have their 
 immortal truth. It is always true when the 
 young begin to grow up that— 
 
 “Honour has come back as a king to earth, 
 And paid his subjects with a royal wage, 
 And nobleness walks in our ways again, 
 And we have come into our heritage.” 
 
 That seemed dramatically true in 1914. It does 
 not seem quite so true of that particular year 
 
 3 
 
4 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 now as it did then; but it zs true, always, and 
 every generation ‘‘comes into its heritage,” and 
 the young have it always in their power to bring 
 honour again to earth, and nobleness to walk in 
 all our ways. The world is always suffering, and 
 suffering is a challenge to every generous spirit to 
 try and find out why it is there and to put it right. 
 The young do not love suffering. ‘They are right 
 not to love it. There is something morbid in the 
 delight in pain that sometimes grows upon one— 
 I suppose from a kind of protective instinct— 
 because there is so much pain in the world. But 
 the healthy reaction, the revolt of the young 
 ‘against suffering, is right and beautiful and God- 
 given. Suffering is a challenge bringing home to 
 us the fact that something is wrong. Therefore 
 to hate it, to rebel against it, and to seek to get 
 rid of it, is right. 
 
 But this generation has gone through a time 
 of such intense suffering, and is still under the 
 shadow of such suffering—for it is now eleven 
 years since the war began, and the young ones 
 of to-day were only eight, nine and ten years old 
 then, so that the war is like a dark shadow rather 
 than a fact—that it has altered their attitude 
 and taken its toll of their vitality, and even those 
 who were babies when the war began have the 
 shadow of that war upon their spirits. Any 
 schoolmistress or master will tell you that the 
 children who were born during the period of the 
 
YOUTH 5 
 
 war are paying the debt in their nerves, in the 
 difficulty which they have in facing life; as well 
 as those who were actually broken in the war. 
 That debt we have to pay for a long time yet, 
 or rather, let me say, they have to pay it. There 
 is among the younger generation a sense of in- 
 security, a sense of the shortness of life and the 
 possibility of death which was foreign to the 
 generation to which I belong, to whom the per- 
 manence of things was far more obvious than 
 their transience. In the youth of to-day there is 
 a sense of the passing of life and the uncertainty 
 of things which has always to be taken into ac- 
 count when one is thinking of the way in which 
 they look at life. It results in one of two ways 
 of thought: either, because life is short, they say, 
 “‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die”’; or 
 they say, ‘‘This debt of pain, this agony of suffer- 
 ing, means that there is something tremendously 
 wrong with the world, and that wrong it is for us 
 to put right.”” I suppose the first attitude, ‘‘Let 
 us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die”’ is very 
 common. When I read the newspapers, I could 
 think it was so common that there was no one 
 who did not have it! The frivolity of the young 
 people of to-day is the theme of every moralist 
 and almost every journalist and preacher. After 
 all, since after six years of so-called ‘‘peace,’’ the 
 world is still upon the brink of war, and those 
 people who believed that war was going to come 
 
6 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 to an end have proved mistaken, and the young 
 have so little control over the mistakes that are 
 made by elder people, they may well argue— 
 ‘Let us take what we can get! Let us enjoy 
 ourselves! We can only be young once. Life 
 may be long, but youth is short. Let us eat and 
 drink, for to-morrow we die.”’ 
 
 I am almost inclined to say to those people, if 
 you can do it, doit! If you can dowt. It is true 
 that we have made the world, we elder ones, into 
 a ghastly mess, and in the last ten or eleven years 
 it has been the young people who have paid the 
 price; the men who have never come back, or 
 who have come back shattered; the girls who lost 
 their mates in the war; the state of society into 
 which the young are growing up, and which gives 
 them a devastating sense of not being wanted. 
 Is not that the worst wrong that can be done to 
 young life—to make the young feel that they are 
 not wanted? Young people who are just coming 
 away from school, or from college, full of a gen- 
 erous enthusiasm, full of dreams, sometimes 
 fantastic dreams, and yet noble dreams, of what 
 they will do in the world and for the world, are 
 now suffering this great wrong. They find a 
 world in which there is no room for them, a world 
 in which they cannot even get work, let alone 
 work in which they can find scope for their ideal- 
 ism and their enthusiasm, a world in which it is a 
 struggle to get a footing at all, .a world in which, 
 
YOUTH | 
 
 instead of people being grateful for what you can 
 do to serve it, you have to be grateful if you can 
 get any kind of work at all. Those gifts which 
 you were beginning to develop at school or at 
 college, sometimes great gifts for original and 
 creative work, the world does not seem to want. 
 A young artist who does lovely creative work has 
 instead to draw cheap drawings for fashion plates. 
 A young musician who has begun to know what 
 art is, who has something of that musical con- 
 science which for years this country seemed to 
 have lost, finds the world ruled by greedy com- 
 mercial people, who care nothing for good art, 
 but only want art that will pay, and who will not 
 give him a chance unless he is prepared to sing 
 cheap songs, and play bad music. 
 
 It is the sense that the world does not want 
 you or does not want the best of you, that is the 
 real wrong done to the younger generation to-day. 
 When such boys and girls realise—consciously 
 or unconsciously—that the world does not really 
 ask for their best, they will perhaps take what 
 they can get and not be worried by any mad 
 desire to reform, and to change, and to move the 
 world. For indeed, it seems, the world does not 
 move, and you waste your young life trying to 
 move it. You might at least have got something 
 for yourself, so that, when you were old, you could 
 say, at any rate I enjoyed my life while I had it! 
 When the young take that point of view, they 
 
8 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 may argue that it does no harm. They do not 
 want to do anything very bad after all. Only 
 just to be let alone and not worried with these 
 everlasting problems which we elder people 
 created for them, and now expect them to solve! 
 
 If you can do that—but no! Even if you can 
 do it, don’t do it! Because, you see, if you take 
 life like that, live your own life and leave the 
 world to go to hell in its own way—if you do that, 
 your own life becomes cramped and small. It is 
 not young, it is old, to think that you can hold 
 so tightly the thing that you can snatch. That 
 is not youth, and it is not the spirit of youth. 
 Do not let us make you old before your time. If 
 you hold on to anything too tight, it begins to 
 wither. It is like holding a flower in too hot and 
 close a hand. It withers. It would have lasted 
 longer and given you greater pleasure if you had 
 left it where it was growing, and loved it. So, 
 if you take life itself, which is so fair and lovely, 
 and hold it too greedily, and make your personal 
 advantage of it, and your personal enjoyment, 
 it begins to wither in your hands, and you say 
 ‘‘youth is short.’’ Yes, indeed, it is short, if you 
 treat it like that—terribly short—for in a little 
 while your interests contract, your vitality flags, 
 you lose that generous enthusiasm which makes 
 the world your workshop and your heritage. 
 Living people must change. They cannot help 
 it. They cannot stand still. So you must either 
 
YOUTH 9 
 
 let your interests grow, or they will contract and 
 narrow, and what seems so innocent and harmless - 
 now—just to let the world go its own way and 
 take what you can get—does not really, in the 
 end, make either for happiness or for youth. 
 You get stifled in that narrow little life of yours, 
 which grows always narrower and narrower. 
 
 Look abroad. What is your heritage? The 
 world itself! The world is your heritage, and if 
 you find a difficulty in establishing that, the 
 fault is yours. Yes, yours. It is the fashion 
 nowadays to speak of young and old as though 
 they belonged to two different species. When I 
 was working in the suffrage movement, people 
 used to speak sometimes as though men and 
 women: belonged to totally different species. 
 Even that was less preposterous than the modern 
 habit of spelling youth with a capital Y, and age 
 with a capital A, and speaking as though they 
 had no interests in common, no common human- 
 ity, but were two absolutely different species, of 
 which the one beginning with a Y was absolutely 
 and perfectly good, and the one beginning with A 
 hopelessly and irredeemably bad. 
 
 That is not true and, because it is not true, 
 it is a pity to go on believing it. It is true that 
 the older generation partly inherited and partly 
 made terrible mistakes. It is not true that they 
 pushed on to the young the whole payment of the 
 price. Younger brothers and sisters, it is gen- 
 
10 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 erally true that your parents love you better 
 than you love them. That is not unnatural or 
 wrong. The debt that you owe them you will 
 repay to your own children. You also will love 
 them more than they love you. Does that seem 
 to you untrue? Well, do you know, Macdougal 
 gives a very interesting example in his great work 
 on Social Psychology. He reminds us that once 
 in a great persecution in Rome it was noticed 
 that many sons denounced their fathers, but xo 
 father ever denounced his son. 
 
 In the war, one of the most poignant tragedies 
 was that of the older generation who saw those 
 for whom they had sacrificed much, whom they 
 had brought into the world, and to whom they 
 had expected to hand on the torch of life, dying in 
 their stead. Of how many of us older people is 
 that not true? We had sons, nephews, friends, 
 to whom we looked to go further, to carry the 
 torch much further on, than we could hope to do. 
 They are dead: and it is cheap, is it not, to say 
 that one would rather have died than let them die? 
 But sometimes it is true. 
 
 I know of a family, a large family and most of 
 them married, but only one had a child and all 
 the hopes of that family were on that boy’s head. 
 He went out and was killed. Can you imagine, 
 you younger people, the sense of baffled and frus- 
 trated love in the hearts of all those older ones? 
 Do you not know it would have been easier for 
 
YOUTH II 
 
 most of them to die than to let him die? If there 
 was one person in all their family circle that they 
 would not have sacrificed, it was he. Think of 
 that saying of Rupert Brooke’s about the gift of 
 the slain of their unborn children—‘‘Those who 
 would have been their sons they gave, their im- 
 mortality.” No one can read that without 
 realising that it is the most poignant line in the 
 whole sonnet. Their sons they gave—their un- 
 born sons, their immortality. For it is immor- 
 tality, in a sense, to hand on the torch of life to 
 someone else. But to the impersonal sense of 
 frustrated and baffled love which the younger 
 man feels who has had no son is added in the case 
 of parents the personal sense of loss of one already 
 known and loved, so that the loss is doubled. Do 
 not, in your resentment against the older world, 
 forget that the older generation in spite of all, has 
 paid in blood and agony for the mistakes it made. 
 
 And you—you younger ones? These men, 
 these Rupert Brookes, died not for us, but for 
 you; for the old world they had no great love, 
 but the new world—it was for that they died. 
 You think we owe them a debt? Yes, but you 
 owe them a much greater debt. For you they 
 “poured out the red sweet wine of youth” and 
 “laid the world aside,” and work, and joy, and 
 ‘“‘that serene that men call age.”” They gave it 
 for the younger generation, and you are here and 
 have your chance because of them. 
 
12 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 Well, but what a world! So indifferent, so 
 despairing, so materialistic, so determined to go 
 to war again, so indifferent it seerns, to the things 
 that the noblest of the younger generation care 
 about. Must you, then, repeat the mistakes of 
 which you are complaining? If the world does 
 not seem to want you, its real need is all the more. 
 A world in which the younger generation has not 
 got room to grow up, is a scandalously ill-arranged 
 and suffering kind of world. Because we did not 
 set it right, you are suffering. Well, but you 
 must set it right, lest others have to suffer! If 
 every younger generation as it grows up and finds 
 the world slow to change (and God knows it is 
 slow to change) derives from that merely a 
 grudging resentment, and thinks, ‘“‘If the world 
 won’t change, and treats us badly, we will just 
 enjoy ourselves,’ then the world remains in this 
 pit, and all those things which you resent against 
 the older generation you are laying up for your 
 children. You must change it, and I will tell you 
 why. 
 
 Because you alone can change it. In order to 
 change the world, you must first believe that 
 change is possible. But it is very difficult for 
 older people to believe it. They too once tried 
 to change it. They too once dreamed their 
 dreams. And in one generation, in one lifetime, 
 we do not see much change. We see so little 
 that we begin to think, towards the end of our 
 
YOUTH 13 
 
 lives, that change is impossible, and all those 
 silly, worn-out tags of worldly wisdom—‘‘ You 
 can’t change human nature,” and that sort of 
 thing—seem true at last. We grow so terribly 
 accustomed to failure, because so many blows 
 have fallen upon us, so many disappointments 
 have overtaken us, that at last it becomes almost 
 impossible to believe that the world can greatly 
 change. 
 
 I remember just when the war broke out 
 meeting Felix Moscheles, one of the world’s 
 greatest workers for peace. He died shortly 
 afterwards: I suppose the war killed him. I 
 remember, when I took his hand, it felt cold and 
 lifeless, and he looked almost as though the 
 spirit in him had died already, for all his life’s 
 work had apparently gone down for nothing in 
 that hell. That which happened to him happens 
 in lesser ways to all of us. We all have our 
 hopes, and dreams, and ideals; and over and over 
 again we fail, or—even worse—we succeed and 
 find our success a caricature of the thing we hoped 
 for. Sometimes I think the great reformers must 
 almost wish they had not succeeded. They could 
 have gone on dreaming of what success would be 
 like, then; but when they have succeeded, actually 
 succeeded, the ideal they loved is coarsened by 
 realisation and warped by the compromises that 
 had to be made. The thing that was to them a 
 dream and a vision has become a caricature when 
 
14 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 seen in reality. You have not yet experienced 
 that, or have not experienced it as the old have, 
 and therefore, while there are some old who are 
 young in spirit and still believe the world can 
 change and will, there are far more who are young 
 in years to whom that belief is their natural 
 inheritance. You can believe the world will 
 change, and your belief is just. You are right, 
 and those who despair are wrong. Your faith is 
 justified by reason. All the anticipations of all 
 the pessimists in the world cannot hide the fact 
 that the human race has gone forward, has gone 
 amazingly forward, and if you look long enough 
 you will see that those who died broken-hearted 
 because their ideals seemed such a caricature 
 when they were realised, were justified in the end. 
 You, looking back, can see how great they really 
 were and how wise. You can see that in spite 
 of their faults and defects, their ideals did lift 
 the world a little further along the road and make 
 it possible for us to believe that the world can 
 change and does. 
 
 Do you remember how Robert Louis Stevenson 
 said once when old people told him that when 
 he was as old as they were he would think as 
 they did—‘‘Very likely I shall, but that does not 
 prove I shall be right!’’ Very likely you will 
 think old thoughts when you are old in years. 
 Very likely you too will say that the world cannot 
 change; but that does not prove that you will be 
 
YOUTH 15 
 
 right! No, it is now that you are right, now 
 while you believe in great possibilities, in much 
 greater possibilities than the world has dared to 
 hope. There is no sense in saying “‘because things 
 have always been so, they always will be so.” 
 Your ideals may yet be nobly realised. Your 
 hope may not, in realisation, prove a failure, a 
 caricature. The fact that it has often been so 
 is no proof whatever that it must be so, and 
 there is at least rational ground for believing 
 that, however slowly, the world does go forward, 
 and that humanity rises slowly indeed, but cer- 
 tainly. In the long-recorded ages of science we 
 see that humanity evolving. 
 
 Since you can believe this and older people 
 often cannot, it is for you to do it. The world 
 will not be changed by those who believe it 
 cannot be changed. Such people may go on 
 working, from a sad sense of duty, for a future 
 in which they have ceased to believe; but it is those 
 who believe who will bring it about, and since it 
 is possible to you to believe, possible from the 
 very fact that you have not been so bludgeoned 
 as we older ones have been, the tools are to you. 
 Use them. As long as you believe in the possi- 
 bility of progress you are young; when you lose it 
 you are old. For youth and age have nothing 
 essentially to do with years. We are all immortal 
 spirits. Whence do we come and what was our 
 history before we came here? I do not know, 
 
16 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 but this I know: that faith in the possibilities of 
 God, faith in the capacity of man to realise and to 
 respond to a great ideal, is the very spirit of youth, 
 whatever our mortal years, and as long as we 
 have it our spirits are eternally young. It isa 
 blasphemy against God to deny that the world 
 can change. It is blasphemy against man to 
 say that when he sees the highest he will not seek 
 after it. Believe it, and go forward, for once 
 believing it, you will not be able to say again, 
 *‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” 
 Inspiration will come to you which will teach 
 you the very opposite of that: he that seeks to 
 save his life is the one that loses it, and he that is 
 willing to cast it away is the one to whom life 
 comes ever more and more abundantly. 
 
 You see the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming 
 down from God out of heaven, prepared as a 
 bride adorned for her husband, and you hear a 
 great voice out of heaven, saying, “‘ The dwelling 
 place of God is with men, and they shall be my 
 people, and I will be their God.” 
 
MIDDLE AGE 
 
 Ge). Lord never reached middle age, and I 
 
 suppose that is, fundamentally, the reason 
 why many people feel that middle age is rather 
 dreary. It is because so many of the finest 
 spirits died when they were young; so often that 
 it has become a proverb to say ‘‘Those whom the 
 gods love die young.’’ Our Lord himself, who 
 might have been thirty-three—who could not, I 
 believe, have been more than thirty-five or thirty- 
 six—when he died, gives to those who love him 
 an example and an inspiration at so many points 
 of life, that to find that one cannot get from him 
 the kind of guidance that one would desire at 
 middle age makes us feel that it is better to be 
 swept out of life before the process of growing 
 old and losing the glamour and the glory of 
 existence comes upon us. 
 
 What is middle age? When do we begin to 
 be middle-aged? For myself I can say that up 
 to my present year I have found every year of 
 my life more exciting than the year before, and 
 the idea that there is something dreary and dull 
 about middle age—wnecessarily dreary and dull— 
 seems to me fundamentally mistaken. 
 
 17 
 
18 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 After all, when we reach the watershed of life, 
 which divides the growing up from the descent, 
 we ought to have learned a great deal about our- 
 selves. It has been said that a man of forty who 
 is not able to act as his own doctor must be a fool. 
 I do not think that is altogether true, but there 
 is something in it. He ought to know by that 
 time, more or less, what physically agrees with 
 him, what he can eat without having indigestion, 
 and how much he can eat, what holidays he needs, 
 and so on. And forty is hardly middle-aged. 
 Surely, then, by the time we are approaching 
 fifty we ought to know something about our own 
 personality! We ought to know, roughly speak- 
 ing, what kind of people we are. 
 
 Now one of the most harassing things about 
 youth is our complete uncertainty as to what 
 kind of a person we are. Whether one is very 
 remarkable, extraordinarily good, or very com- 
 monplace, or very bad is all uncertain. Personally 
 I never could be at all certain, and I believe I 
 generally hoped that I was the kind of person 
 that I had just read about in some book—if it 
 was an attractive person, a great saint, or a great 
 adventurer, or somebody who had excelled in 
 some role of life! Or perhaps somebody whose 
 life was one long act of self-sacrifice of which 
 nobody would ever know until after I was dead. 
 It was most harassing, this uncertainty, because 
 
 although there is a certain natural conceit in 
 
MIDDLE AGE 19 
 
 young people (it zs natural, and nobody ought 
 to be irritated by it) there is also a recurring 
 sense of inferiority. Are your opinions yours, 
 or have you simply accepted them from some- 
 body else? Have your most cherished convic- 
 tions been thrust upon you by somebody you 
 specially admire, or by the circle in which you 
 grew up, or by the tradition that was in your 
 family? Those ideals in which you believe, are 
 they really utterly foolish and unreal? Are they 
 opinions which only very young and ignorant 
 people could hold, or is there some truth in them? 
 Perhaps before the world we put up a bluff of 
 being absolutely certain—more certain than any- 
 one ever could be!—and yet how often there comes 
 into our minds a fear that perhaps we are only an 
 empty shell with nothing really our own in it at 
 all, and that neither our ideals, nor our principles, 
 nor our convictions, nor even the virtues that the 
 world ascribes to us, are really ours. 
 
 What kind of people are we going to be? We 
 make false starts, try to be all sorts of different 
 people, and then find we cannot. We are not 
 that sort of person at all, and there comes to us 
 a terrible sense of failure. Life seems so short 
 when one is very young. I can remember feeling 
 that twenty-two (the august age to which one of 
 my friends had attained) was very old, and that it 
 really could not matter what happened to anyone 
 after he was thirty. When one is young, how 
 
20 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 short life is, and how urgent it is that one should 
 know the sort of person he wants to be and 
 whether he has the capacity to be that person. 
 
 When we are middle-aged, there is one great 
 factor in our favour. We either know what sort 
 of person we are, or at least we have the materials 
 for knowing. Perhaps some day psychology 
 will have reached a point of wisdom at which it 
 will be able to help us while we are much, much 
 younger, to guide our lives and to know the aim 
 that we ought to set before us; for if there is one 
 lesson that life teaches more than another I 
 think it is this—that we must try to be the very 
 best kind of person of the kind that we are, but 
 that it is fatal to try to be some other kind. That 
 lesson psychology is teaching us to-day—that 
 we must be ourselves, we must devote ourselves 
 to being the very best that is in us, we must carry 
 the powers we have to their highest point; but 
 we must not waste our time and strength in 
 trying to be some other kind of person alto- 
 gether. 
 
 If, then, by the time you are middle-aged, 
 you know what sort of person you are, how much 
 more direct, how much more smooth, how much 
 more sure your path can be in the future! In- 
 stead of wasting your strength in a vain effort to 
 be somebody quite different from any person 
 that is implicit in you at all, you know now the 
 sort of person that you are. You do not know 
 
MIDDLE AGE 21 
 
 at all how greatly you may be that person. You 
 do not know that, even when you are middle-aged. 
 You do not know how far you may go along that 
 path; but you do know what path it is. I am 
 not speaking of one’s career. Sometimes that 
 changes, even in middle age. But your tem- 
 perament, your character, your psyche, you 
 know that by now. Or if some of you do not 
 yet know what kind of person you are, you have 
 at least got the materials for knowing. You 
 have lived—how long? Let us say fifty years. 
 In fifty years you have made enough mistakes 
 and achieved enough successes and followed your 
 path in life sufficiently, with all your false starts, 
 to know, if you choose, what kind of person you 
 are, and while psychology is still in its present 
 rather inchoate condition, that is something that 
 we may be thankful for. Take stock of yourself. 
 If you are discouraged, if you feel that middle 
 age is rather dreary, if you would like to go back 
 even to those false starts, since, after all they 
 meant the possibility of a start, take stock of 
 yourself. Why did you make all those mistakes? 
 What are the obstacles that you were or are up 
 against? Are they outside you, or are they within 
 you? Have you chosen wrong? Is it possible 
 for you to choose again? If it is not, what can 
 you make of life where you are? You have all 
 the material; the young, have not. They have 
 to make their adventures and take their risks, 
 
22 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 because all their experience is before them; but 
 you have got that experience. Set it down, even, 
 if you like, on paper: the things you have succeeded 
 in, the things you have failed in, the things you 
 might have done once, and did not, and why you 
 did not. Think in a dispassionate and cold- 
 blooded way. Consider where you stand, and if 
 you do that faithfully, honestly, sincerely, you 
 will be in a position to move with much greater 
 certainty, to be a much more steady and poised 
 and efficient person, than you could while you 
 were making shots in the dark, as you had to do 
 when you were young. There will come into 
 your life the sense of effectiveness, the sense of 
 knowing what you are about and where you are 
 going; and the fret and fever, the heartbreaking 
 sense of failure which pursued you when you 
 were making one false start after another, will 
 pass away. I asked myself this morning, as 
 honestly as I could, would I go back now to be 
 young again if I could? If I could be twenty 
 again, would I? For a moment I thought, ‘Yes, 
 I would, if I could,’ and then I asked myself why, 
 and do you know what the reason was? It was 
 because I was imagining myself going back to 
 twenty with all the knowledge of myself that I 
 have at forty-seven. I figured to myself that I 
 would not waste my time again trying to be 
 something quite other than anything I ever could 
 be. I imagined myself going back to be twenty 
 
MIDDLE AGE 23 
 
 with all that I have gained in the process of years. 
 I wanted to go back and avoid all the mistakes 
 I have made, and all the time that I have wasted, 
 with the knowledge of myself that middle age 
 has given to me. Well, anyone would like to do 
 that, because all of us have made mistakes we wish 
 we had not made, and lost opportunities we wish we 
 had not lost; and if anyone were to say, Go back 
 now, and avoid all those errors, who that has any 
 penitence in him at all would not say, ‘‘Thank 
 God. I will go and no more make these mistakes.” 
 But when I asked myself, would you go back and 
 be twenty as you were at twenty? Would you do 
 that? No, indeed I would not. Why should I 
 go again through all those blunders and stupidities, 
 through all that fret and anxiety, and lose what 
 I have learned? 
 
 To-day I have instead the knowledge which 
 comes with middle age, and which gives a thrill 
 to the middle-aged. I realise that at this point 
 of life, standing, so to speak, on the watershed of 
 life, death becomes real in a sense that it cannot 
 be real to the young. The young do not really 
 expect to die, no, not when the chances of death 
 are all round them. When men go into battle, 
 ninety-nine out of a hundred expect that they 
 will come out safe. They go into it, perhaps, 
 with terror in their hearts, brave as they are. 
 They know that they may be struck. And yet 
 there is an invincible conviction in the minds of 
 
24 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 most that they will not—that they are of those 
 who will come out safe. But when we come to 
 middle age, there comes suddenly a thrilling sense 
 of the reality of death. It is not any longer a 
 mere fact of common knowledge that we must 
 die: it is a reality. We shall die and go on to 
 some other life, and all that we do here and now 
 has a significance there. What we are now, and 
 what we make of the rest of our lives is part of 
 our schooling for the life hereafter. Everything 
 we do and say and think counts for that. Do you 
 think your education at school and college for life 
 in this world, with all its mystery, is half as won- 
 derful as the education of life itself for death? 
 How little the young know of life! How full of 
 romance and mystery and wonder it is! Yes, 
 but they know more about the life here than you 
 and I know about life hereafter. 
 
 This consciousness comes, I think, with a 
 sudden reality, when we reach the middle of our 
 life and perhaps reckon with ourselves, ‘‘I have 
 lived now longer than I have yet, in the normal 
 way, to live.’”’ When death becomes a reality to 
 us so, it brings a sense of wonder, a background 
 of infinity into this life, which makes the idea of 
 middle age being dreary or dull impossible. 
 
 I never felt life half so romantic as I did the 
 first time I realised—not knew, for we all know it— 
 but realised—that I should have to die, and that 
 this life on earth is just a stage. 
 
MIDDLE AGE 25 
 
 “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, 
 The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 
 And cometh from afar.” 
 
 And, coming from afar, we pause on this earth for 
 awhile, and go on. That is what makes life so 
 significant. What would life matter, after all, 
 if this were all? The significance and the wonder 
 and the romance of life is in its preparation for 
 another and yet greater adventure. Sir James 
 Barrie, who has said more true and wonderful 
 things than any man of his generation, never said 
 anything more wonderful and true than when he 
 said, ‘‘To die will be an awfully great adventure.”’ 
 The radiance of that adventure shines on us when 
 we begin to realise the significance of our lives as 
 an episode here, in some infinite hereafter. 
 
 So it matters tremendously when you are 
 middle-aged and have made many mistakes, and 
 are even, perhaps, in the wrong way altogether, 
 that you should set to work here and now to use 
 the rest of your life, not as though life were dreary 
 and dull, but as an episode in a great journey, 
 whose end is God. 
 
 Set to work and discipline yourself. One of 
 the dreadful things about being middle-aged is 
 that other people do not discipline us in the way 
 they used to when we were young. We can 
 always have the most comfortable chair in the 
 
26 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 room. Nobody will tell us that we are eating 
 too much, or that we are eating the wrong things! 
 I once knew an elderly lady who had so delicate 
 a digestion that she.could not eat bread: she could 
 only eat hot scones! We used to say to one 
 another that she was silly and greedy, but do you 
 think we ever said that to her face? If I had 
 eaten hot scones at twenty and said I could not 
 digest bread, I should have been told the truth 
 about myself. But we can let ourselves go when 
 we are middle-aged, because there are very few 
 people in a position to pull us up. That is per- 
 haps even more true of men than it is of women. 
 They are ‘‘the head of the family,” and how many 
 of your families, gentlemen, are going to discipline 
 you? If the children do, you think they are 
 merely impertinent. If the wife does, she has 
 to do it so exquisitely carefully, that it is not 
 really as good discipline as it ought to be. Re- 
 member therefore that you can pull up the young 
 people, or you can at least make them know that 
 they are not exactly the ideal people in the home 
 they might be; but how about you? How easy 
 it is now to escape the discipline of life in little 
 things! I do not mean the great big things that 
 overwhelm us all sometimes, but those little 
 things which, properly treated, make us strong 
 enough to deal with the big things. 
 
 Really, most of us eat too much. That sounds 
 a mundane thing to say from a pulpit, but it is 
 
MIDDLE AGE 27 
 
 not unimportant. When Dr. Julia Seaton urged 
 us to fast, she said it was especially good for those 
 who were middle-aged, and quoted a certain 
 saying of our Lord’s:— 
 
 “Shall the children of the bride chamber fast while 
 the bridegroom is with them” or the young fast while 
 life is full and vigorous and strong and splendid? 
 The time will come when they will lose that. ‘‘ Then 
 shall they fast in those days.”’ 
 
 We middle-aged people have ceased to grow 
 physically. We shall not grow any more. Life 
 is not demanding much of us in that sense. We 
 should not clog our bodies by giving them what 
 they do not need. Deny yourself, discipline 
 yourself. It is a very ancient rule of the great 
 religions of the world, that people should fast 
 sometimes. It is not for nothing that they 
 develop that discipline. In middle age especially, 
 we should advance to a new and heroic mastery 
 over our bodies. 
 
 Discipline yourself intellectually. It is not 
 too late to learn. Learning can be made a habit, 
 and the longer you keep it up, the younger you 
 will be in spirit. Do not say it is too late for you 
 to learn. Try to see whether you are not 
 cleverer than you thought! If you will feed your 
 mind (which goes on developing after the demands 
 of the body have ceased) it will go on growing. 
 It is at the point at which you say—or find your- 
 
28 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 self inclined to say—‘‘it is too late for me to learn 
 this and that and the other” that you begin to 
 grow old. Youth is full of curiosity and desire to 
 learn, but by degrees we find that learning is 
 difficult, and involves a good deal of energy and 
 trouble. We begin to dread ‘‘the pain of a new 
 idea’’ and the old ideas seem quite good enough. 
 So at middle age we are inclined to believe that it 
 is too late. It is too late at that exact moment 
 when you are resigned to its being too late! For 
 not to be able to change is to begin to die, and 
 as long as you can change, as long as your mind 
 can grow and your intellect take things in, your 
 spirit is still young; and being young, it keeps all 
 the rest of you young. 
 
 Then, because you know who you are and 
 what you are, what your line in life is, you need 
 not be in a state of anxiety and haste. A certain 
 peace of mind should come to you, a certain sense 
 of balance, and serenity. Take time, even if you 
 have to take it by violence. ‘‘The kingdom of 
 heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take 
 it by force.’”” Take time to be quiet. It is not 
 displeasing, it is not offensive, for the young to 
 be in a hurry. Perhaps they ought to cultivate 
 quietness, but it is natural for them to be in haste. 
 They have so much to do, so much to understand, 
 so much to know. But there is something repel- 
 lent about the middle age that has no serenity and 
 no poise, that is always racketing about mentally, 
 
MIDDLE AGE 29 
 
 that has no peace in its heart. After all, you 
 have got away, or should have got away, from 
 that fever and fret—in return for what? Not 
 just vacancy, not just dulness, but peace. The 
 peace which the world cannot give, but which 
 you must take, have time to take, and keep your 
 mind at rest. 
 
 In that silence which is far, far more necessary 
 to you than to the young, you will know yourself 
 better, and you will know others also, and knowing 
 them you will believe in them, for this certainly 
 life has taught us, that every human being has 
 capacities for goodness, and even for greatness, 
 and that cynicism and disappointment and dis- 
 illusion are simply the opinion of the egotist 
 against all the history of humanity. The blows 
 that have fallen upon you, the ideals that you 
 found it so difficult to believe in, the disillusion- 
 ment that sets in for you, the disappointments in 
 other human beings, these things are your ex- 
 perience. Look abroad, and see whether it is 
 not a fact that it is goodness and love and brother- 
 liness and friendship, and essential decency that 
 holds the world together. What do those people 
 mean who tell us that human nature is so evil? 
 Are they really so ignorant as to suppose that if 
 the world were more evil than good it could hold 
 together at all? The evidence of their own 
 experience should at least include this great fact, 
 that only good things can cohere, that only good- 
 
30 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 ness binds and creates and holds together, and 
 that therefore if the world holds together at all, 
 it is because there is more good in it than bad. 
 These ideals that you find it so difficult to hold— 
 why do you find it difficult? Because of your 
 personal disappointment? Because people have 
 disappointed you? Because they have misjudged 
 you and treated you unkindly and been ungrateful 
 for the things you did for them? Don’t you realise 
 if you look at yourself, how much it is your fault? 
 Those things that hurt most savagely when we 
 are young will not hurt so much when we are 
 older, and not because we have grown cynical 
 and think it does not matter, but because we 
 have begun to understand why these things 
 happen. 
 
 Why do people seem ungrateful? I will tell 
 you. Almost always it is because they have 
 not understood what you have tried to do for 
 them. When people do understand, their grati- 
 tude is almost pathetic. Some little tiny thing 
 that costs you nothing will bring you a world of 
 gratitude, because the person for whom you did 
 it understood the thing you did. The thing 
 which does not bring you gratitude, either you 
 have done badly, and therefore did not deserve 
 thanks, or else the ungrateful person does not 
 understand. Have you always understood? Have 
 you not a thousand times received benefits and 
 not had the faintest notion what they cost to 
 
MIDDLE AGE 31 
 
 other people? If you are such a good, kind, 
 decent person and can in your own conscience 
 count a thousand times when you were ungrateful, 
 and yet you know you were trying to behave 
 decently, why should you be so bitter against 
 others? Perhaps they are trying to behave 
 decently, just as hard as you are, when they 
 misjudge you. Do you never misjudge them? 
 How can you possibly judge anyone without 
 knowing them? And you do not know anyone 
 perfectly, not anyone at all, and yet you utter a 
 judgment every time you open your lips. Do you 
 remember that moving passage in one of George 
 Eliot’s novels, in which she says, ‘‘Perhaps at 
 the very moment that you are criticising someone 
 for his failure, he is suffering an agony of regret 
 for the thing he did wrong.’”’ You would not 
 misjudge him—you would not judge him at all, 
 if you knew that. While the world judges you, 
 why need you be cynical about it? After all, 
 would you like people to know everything about 
 you? They cannot be perfectly just unless they 
 do. Do you want them to? You know you do 
 not. There is not one of us that has not got some 
 reserves that only God can know. Well, then, 
 why should you be discouraged or cynical, or 
 think evil of the world because people do not 
 judge you quite wisely and are not always as 
 grateful as you think they should be? 
 
 Middle age should bring a deep kindliness of 
 
32 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 view, and a deeper understanding of oneself and 
 a deeper understanding of other people. Listen, 
 be silent, pray; because your time is shorter than 
 it was twenty years ago, it is all the more necessary 
 that you should direct it rightly now. Life and 
 death are to you greater adventures than when 
 you were young. You had more time then to 
 make your mistakes. Now you have less time, 
 more knowledge. Go directly on your path, and 
 remember that death is not the end. It is only 
 the beginning of something else. 
 
 Does not that bring back to you the romance 
 and the glory of youth? Christ, as I reminded 
 you at the beginning, knew no middle age in our 
 sense of the word, but his experience in that 
 comparatively short life went so deep that we 
 find him at the heart of all experience. He went 
 through all the gamut of human experience, and 
 in the end he said what we must all learn to say, 
 ‘Father, into thy hands I trust my spirit.’”’ All 
 that you are doing, learning, being, now is an 
 education for that moment, and beyond it, into 
 the hands of God, trust your spirit. 
 
OLD AGE 
 
 THINK it is very presumptuous of me to 
 
 preach about growing old, because, although 
 I have been young and now am in middle life, I 
 do not yet know old age. But, though I am 
 convinced that beautiful old age is a most in- 
 spiring and lovely thing, I am certain that none 
 of us will achieve a beautiful old age unless we 
 begin to achieve it while we are young! So it 
 seemed to me that it would be worth while to try 
 to say something. 
 
 If you young people are going to be beautiful 
 old people, you must start now. For this is 
 largely a matter of habit, and habits are things 
 that we are forming all the time. As we grow 
 older, our habits grow old with us, and become 
 much more difficult to change, and if we are going 
 to be at all inspiring or beautiful or “‘reverend”’ 
 when we are old, we ought to begin very young. 
 
 We are creatures of habit, and when a habit 
 has grown right into us, we begin to feel that 
 any kind of change must be bad. I want to ask 
 all middle-aged people, and all old ones, to realise 
 this: that change is a sign of life. To think that 
 
 33 
 
34 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 change is bad in itself (which is a very common 
 temptation as we grow older) is a denial of life. 
 We must change if we are alive, and therefore, 
 although there are bad changes as well as good 
 changes, our attitude of mind ought to be that 
 we do welcome change, and not that we dread it. 
 There are bad changes, of course; but change 7m 
 itself is a sign of life, and therefore we ought to be 
 troubled if we are not changing; and when old 
 people say that the younger generation is very 
 mad and very bad, just because it is different 
 from the older generation, should they not realise 
 that change is part of life, and therefore the 
 younger generation must be different from the 
 older one? It is at least possible that the changes 
 that we notice as we grow old are changes for 
 the better, and not changes for the worse. When 
 therefore we find ourselves inclined to say that 
 it is really dreadful that the younger generation 
 should do this, or that, or the other, let us ask 
 ourselves before we say it—even as we feel the 
 words forming on our lips—whether it really is 
 dreadful, or whether it is not something which 
 may possibly be better than what our own gen- 
 eration did. There is no subject, for example, 
 on which every generation waxes more eloquent 
 than the way in which young people, young girls 
 especially, dress, and people complain of this 
 generation as of others; yet I am confident that 
 reasonable people, if they stopped to think, would 
 
OLD AGE 35 
 
 see that women’s dress has never been more 
 beautiful, more dignified, or more rational than 
 it is in the present generation. I am delighted 
 to find that Sir George Newman tells us that the 
 lower death-rate and the improved health of this 
 generation is largely due to the way in which 
 women dress! Let me read what he says: 
 
 ‘““More reasonable dress, the disappearance of tight 
 clothing and trailing skirts, a far larger amount of 
 outdoor exercise, more active amusements and 
 athletics, and open-air life, have brought an immense 
 improvement in the personal health of men and 
 women, an improvement which has almost abolished 
 a form of anemia previously common, and has 
 materially affected the whole standard of their 
 health.” 
 
 Well, that is only one, and perhaps you will think 
 a frivolous example, but there is no complaint 
 more common than for each generation in turn 
 to say that the younger generation dresses in a 
 manner ugly, indecent, and intolerable, whereas 
 if we stop to look we shall see that—if for safety’s 
 sake, I press my case a little beyond any genera- 
 tion that can possibly be present to-night !—the 
 race whose women once wore crinolines and now 
 dress as they do is certainly going forward. 
 
 Take a more serious instance. The other day 
 a friend of mine (who is young enough to know 
 better) expressed horror at the terrible increase 
 
 a 
 
36 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 of vulgar curiosity which caused a certain bunga- 
 low where a terrible murder had been committed, 
 to be opened as an exhibition to the public. Now 
 just stop and think. It is only a very short time, 
 as history goes, since, not the bungalow where the 
 crime was committed, but the murderer being 
 put to death was a public exhibition, which people 
 went in crowds to see and also took their children 
 to see. Nothing in the world prevented that from 
 going on but public opinion. Undoubtedly there 
 are people to-day who, if such a terrible thing 
 could be seen, would go and see it. Never- 
 theless, it is the opinion of the mass of the people 
 that has put a stop to the exhibition of the dying 
 agonies of a man executed by process of law. 
 There is not an “‘increase in vulgar curiosity”’; 
 there is a decrease. And if you will only consider, 
 you will see again and again that those things 
 which strike you with pain and horror in the present 
 generation strike you with pain and horror pre- 
 cisely because public opinion is now so much 
 more sensitive, so much more humane, than it 
 was; that a thing which would have passed with- 
 out notice a little while ago, to-day seems to us 
 terrible. It is an increased sensitiveness, a higher 
 public opinion, that makes us sensitive to these 
 things. 
 
 Look wider. Look further. You will see that 
 that increased sensitiveness is a sign of the im- 
 provement of public opinion, and that indeed 
 
OLD AGE 37 
 
 very often the things which we deplore as signs 
 of degeneracy in the younger generation really 
 show it on the upgrade and not on the down. 
 
 May I suggest that that idea should be wel- 
 come to anyone who has a decent humanity? 
 If there is one thing that does seem sometimes 
 rather terrible in old age, it is not so much that 
 they believe we are going to the dogs, but that 
 some of them seem to take a distinct pleasure in 
 the belief! They delight to think how much 
 better their generation was, and in a sense, al- 
 though they shake their heads over it and deplore 
 it, they seem positively to enjoy the spectacle of 
 the world going to the dogs. 
 
 Oh, older brothers and sisters, do you not see 
 that when you bring an indictment against the 
 younger generation, you are bringing a far more 
 serious indictment against yourselves? For we 
 were once in your hands. You are our parents. 
 You were our teachers. Our heredity is handed 
 on to us from you, and our environment in those 
 years when we were most susceptible was in your 
 hands. Educationists say that the first seven 
 years of a child’s life are those in which his char- 
 acter is moulded. Psychologists tell us that 
 before the child is born into the world its tempera- 
 ment is being affected, and its destiny perhaps 
 decided. Those years of early infancy, those 
 months before the child was born into the world, 
 were in your hands, and although I do not for an 
 
38 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 instant absolve anyone from his personal respon- 
 sibility, yet I must think that to bring an indict- 
 ment against the younger generation is always, 
 if the older one would realise it, to bring a far 
 more terrible indictment against the older one. 
 What have you done to us that we have not done 
 better? What start did you give us that we are 
 not able to make a better thing of life than this? . 
 You should desire, should you not, both for our 
 sakes and your own, that we go further than you 
 did? It is a short-sighted egotism which makes 
 an old man glad when the work to which he has 
 set his hand goes to pieces when he leaves it. It 
 is a poor kind of pride that delights in the thought 
 that the others cannot get on without him, that 
 when he leaves everything is ruined! Surely it 
 is a greater tribute to you to know that the 
 younger generation profits by the start you gave 
 them. If they do not go further than you went, 
 what was the matter with you that you gave them 
 so ill a start? Let us admit that it is, at first, 
 hard to see the work that you started, that you 
 created, that you built up, falling into the hands 
 of others who will, perhaps, do it better than you 
 could. So the old sometimes hold on to power 
 with a passionate, a desperate grasp. They can- 
 not let it go because they cannot bear to know 
 that others will take it up and use it better than 
 they did. Surely that is an ignoble feeling, 
 though perhaps it sometimes attacks us all. We 
 
OLD AGE 39 
 
 should realise that our true greatness can be 
 measured by the extent to which the others whom 
 we started, perhaps our children, our employés, our 
 friends, our disciples, can surpass us—the dis- 
 tance by which they can go beyond. A generous 
 old age takes a disinterested and beautiful pride 
 in the fact that the world does go forward. Per- 
 haps you have a right to think that you gave the 
 world a little push forward. You helped it in 
 the right direction. But then that terrible desire 
 to hold on to things, which so withers and cramps 
 them, came to you. How can we conquer it? 
 we must not, I think, ever let ourselves take a 
 short-sighted or a personal view, but must, as 
 life goes on, seek for an ever wider and wider vision 
 and realise that in proportion as our work was 
 well done, it will grow beyond us. 
 
 Again, we must beware of our own habits. 
 The older we get, the fewer people there are to 
 tell us that our habits are odious, and that we 
 really must break them! Therefore we must 
 tell it to ourselves. Very often the reason why 
 older people are not welcomed by the younger (if 
 they are not welcome) is not for any very great 
 or glaring fault of character. It is simply that 
 their habits have become idols, so that they want 
 everything to be exactly ‘just so.’”’ Young 
 people can be overridden. We can tell them not 
 to make a fuss; that it does not matter a bit 
 whether their egg is boiled for four minutes or 
 
40 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 four anda half! But as we grow older, we gradu- 
 ally allow ourselves to feel that these things are 
 very important and that—for us at least—they 
 must be just so. When you begin to feel like 
 that, pull yourself up. If you like your egg 
 boiled for three and a half minutes, boil it for 
 five for once, and see how you get on. You will 
 find either that it really does not matter and you 
 can eat your egg just as well, or that you can go 
 without it, and the world does not stop. Let us 
 acquire the habit of realising that no habit matters 
 very much! Let us train ourselves to hold things 
 lightly and not to hang on to individual habits 
 though they have become like a sort of shell in 
 which we live. This it is to be young in spirit; 
 and to feel that every little thing—how we live, 
 and how we work, and how we sleep, and what 
 we eat, and so on—matters tremendously, this it 
 is to grow old. We should have grown, as we 
 grow older, beyond that. It is natural for young 
 people to think that small things matter very 
 much, because they have not yet learnt to see 
 beyond them. Each little thing in turn is so 
 important. A child cannot see beyond the disap- 
 pointment of a wet day when it was going for a 
 picnic, because it has not learnt yet to see further 
 than that one day. There are people, like child- 
 ren, whose whole day is blighted if they have to 
 go and see the dentist. A little experience of 
 life should help us to realise that the moment will 
 
OLD AGE 41 
 
 infallibly arrive when we shall leave the dentist’s 
 chair, and regain that rapturous feeling with 
 which we go out. 
 
 For old people not to have got beyond a momen- 
 tary discomfort or a disturbance of personal 
 habits is melancholy, is it not? And it is, believe 
 me, very often the reason why young people find 
 the company of old people burdensome. It is 
 not age that makes it so. It is not age: it is in- 
 sistence on all manner of little things that do not 
 really matter. The habit of looking beyond 
 the troubles and inconveniences of the day can 
 be cultivated. 
 
 Some people have written to me on this subject 
 of old age, that what chiefly distresses them is 
 the feeling of depression and discouragement 
 that comes, and that is perhaps inevitable, because 
 physically their powers are running down. Be- 
 lieve me, the young often feel depressed. ‘This is 
 not a matter of age. There is no despair so great 
 as the despair of youth. It is a darkness that 
 overwhelms the young because they cannot yet 
 see beyond their own failures and their own mis- 
 takes. Speaking from my own experience among 
 old and young, I would say that the sense of utter 
 discouragement, the feeling that you cannot 
 make any impression on the world, cannot get 
 the work you want or, when you have it, are sure 
 to make a failure of it, is far more black and far 
 more overwhelming with the young than it is 
 
42 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 with the old. We are all depressed sometimes, 
 and there is a certain gallantry in putting that 
 depression away where people cannot see it. But 
 that ts a discipline that life ought. to make easier 
 to us, and not harder. 
 
 Above all, do not be afraid. Depression that 
 comes from fear is very hard to bear. Perhaps 
 those who worked hardest when they were young, 
 and cared most, and achieved most, are most open 
 in middle and old age to that kind of fear which 
 comes with the sense that the things you fought 
 for and won, perhaps with blood and sweat, are 
 vanishing or losing their value. The beliefs 
 which you had such a hard intellectual battle to 
 achieve—are they now vanishing in a newer light? 
 Perhaps a delusive light? You won, shall I say, 
 your Christian faith, those of you who are Chris- 
 tians. You won it in the teeth of such difficul- 
 ties! You had such a hard fight! And now the 
 younger generation comes along, and all the 
 things for which you fought so hard seem to them 
 of no importance. Something came along—as, 
 in an older generation, science came along—to 
 revolutionise our ideas about the world, and you 
 fought your way through that. You reached, 
 you thought, a steady place to stand on, and now 
 the world goes on, and the world’s thought, and 
 that steady place seems to shake under you. 
 You had a hard fight, perhaps, about your attitude 
 towards the Bible. You won through to some- 
 
OLD AGE 43 
 
 thing, some place—I do not know what it is for 
 each of you. Then there arises some newer 
 school of thought and the very field of battle is 
 changed, and the old cries are silent, and the 
 things that cost you so much are nothing to the 
 younger generation. The battle has swept on, 
 and you who were in the van are now lingering in 
 the rear, and you ask yourself what use was all 
 the struggle and the cost. Is nothing stable? 
 Is nothing sure? 
 
 ‘“‘We watch,’ Mrs. Creighton writes, ‘‘some- 
 times with almost trembling dread, the passing 
 away of the old ideas that we have trusted, the 
 coming of strange ways of thought, the sweeping 
 away of familiar landmarks, the crude ugliness 
 ofttimes of change to-day.’”’ How true that is! 
 To-day, perhaps, many are feeling about psycho- 
 logy just what a previous generation felt about 
 what is called ‘‘natural science.’ It seems to be 
 digging away at the very roots of their religion— 
 that religion for which they had to fight so hard— 
 and the very change of the battle-ground is a 
 hardship for those who fought on the old fields. 
 The very heroism with which they fought made 
 the victory precious to them, and to find now 
 that a new battle is raging in some other place, 
 while the things which were to you the very rock 
 on which you stood seem to be disappearing in a 
 kind of mist, makes you afraid. 
 
 Well, but it need not! You fought through to 
 
44. LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 that point. Do you want the world to stop 
 there? You who were a fighter, do you want 
 the younger generation to have no fight? In 
 your heart you must desire this thing that on the 
 surface of your mind you are afraid of The 
 first fear that perhaps you are too old to change, 
 too tired to dream of fresh ideals in a world so 
 changed, strikes chill. But it would be more 
 terrible still if there were no change. From the 
 point that you won the next generation starts, 
 and if you fought the battle there and found God 
 with you all the time, need you be afraid because 
 these younger ones will fight the battle further on 
 and find God with them all the time? 
 
 Look for a moment at the tragic harm, the 
 terrible disaster, it has been to religion that, in 
 the generation to which natural science came as 
 a great revelation, theologians fought against it, 
 and religious people were frightened of it. We 
 can all see now what a disaster it was. We are, 
 theologically, two generations behind scientific 
 thought, because of that fear. 
 
 Well, now, if the younger generation advances 
 to meet a fresh battle, and to engage in a fresh 
 struggle for its ideals and its faith, we shall wish 
 them God-speed. Would it not be a disaster if 
 there were no fresh issue before humanity, no 
 great field for achievement? You need not be 
 anxious. You have lived a long life, and all 
 through it you have seen that God was greater 
 
OLD AGE 45 
 
 than any human thought and transcendent above 
 all human fear. Why should you be afraid? 
 Follow the battle in your thoughts. Take your 
 courage, you who have proved your courage, and 
 know it, and can rely on it, take it with you and 
 see whether you also cannot even now play some 
 part in the great battle. Mrs. Creighton in this 
 same little pamphlet on old age, speaks of a very 
 distinguished theologian, Dr. Salmon, who in the 
 very last years of his life—and he lived to a very 
 great age—was working at an important book on 
 the Synoptic Gospels. If we are always learning 
 and never allow our minds to harden, that may 
 be possible to us also. And if a man, whose 
 whole life has been given to theological discussion, 
 should in old age have the courage to advance at 
 the end to a fresh discussion and a fresh battle, 
 is it not magnificent? 
 
 There is an old age that inspires and delights. 
 It will go on, this world of ours, for the Holy 
 Spirit is leading it on, and that you should have 
 been a fighter should make you sympathise with — 
 those who are fighting now. Learn to hold loosely 
 all that is not eternal. Perhaps these victories 
 over our intellectual habits and over our physical 
 habits is God’s gentle way of training us for im- 
 mortality. He is teaching us to hold lightly the 
 things that belong to the body, yes, and even to 
 the mind, because the time comes when we shall 
 ““pass through”’ these ‘‘things temporal to things 
 
46 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 eternal.’’ Our fear of that is largely a fear of the 
 unknown, is it not? It is because we do not 
 know—we cannot imagine—how it will be to be 
 without this flesh-and-blood body which has 
 accompanied us through all our life on earth. 
 But if your mind is being trained by God as the 
 years pass, to hold things lightly, to fix itself on 
 things eternal, and to realise that the temporal 
 things are very passing, will not death itself be 
 less terrible as the idea of the eternal becomes 
 more familiar to the spirit? Old age itself is like 
 a summer holiday before the ‘‘higher education”’ 
 to which we are going on, and should seem in all 
 its beauty like that holiday. 
 
 Let us begin now to make a habit of remember- 
 ing that this life is only an episode in our im- 
 mortality, and old age the holiday which we take 
 when we are tired. When the loveliest holiday 
 of the year, the summer holiday, comes round, 
 you do not feel, as you go off to it, ‘‘Now I am 
 letting go of everything. This is the end.’’ You 
 enjoy your holiday, you delight in it, partly 
 because you are tired and want a rest, but more 
 because you know that when you are rested you 
 can return to work and do it better. Soisit with 
 old age: you are going on to something else. You 
 have some higher adventure, some greater life, 
 some nobler education waiting for you on the 
 other side. Is it not natural then to rest first, 
 and, as Browning says, sum up your gains—yes, 
 
OLD AGE 47 
 
 and your losses too—and look at them calmly 
 and serenely, 
 
 ‘‘Fearless and unperplexed, 
 When you wage battle next, 
 What weapons to select, what armour to indue.” 
 
 It is possible to think of old age as that time of 
 rest and meditation and silence, and even of 
 aloneness; I will not say loneliness, for such an 
 old age is not lonely, although it may be alone. 
 Many of those who were your friends, who, 
 thank God, still are your friends, have passed 
 over before you. The longer you live the fewer 
 you will have on this side, and the more on the 
 other. That also is lovely; but perhaps, here 
 and now, you feel it leaves you alone. Why, no, 
 it leaves you time to be more with God, and there 
 again we must begin young, for unless we grow 
 into the habit of being silent sometimes with 
 God and going away, perhaps, from all our friends 
 and acquaintances to be alone with God, we do 
 not easily acquire that habit in old age. If we 
 begin while we are young, or middle-aged, the 
 desire to be alone with God will grow upon us, 
 and old age, though in a sense it must be isolated, 
 can never then be lonely. 
 
 Do not then desire to ‘‘die in harness.’”” How 
 often I have heard people say that: ‘‘ How splendid 
 to die in harness! To be cut off in the midst of 
 one’s work!’’ Do not desire it. It is a poor, 
 
48 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 cowardly desire. Desire to see the whole of life, 
 to have time to consider, to wait, to judge. To 
 miss old age is to miss something natural, beautiful 
 and right. Are you so poor in thought, are you 
 so unaccustomed to silence and to God that you 
 must die in the height of your work, in all the 
 racket of public business, in all the crowd and 
 press of middle age? Do you not ever feel, you 
 middle-aged ones, that you would like leisure, 
 and loneliness even, for awhile? Do you not 
 feel it? Do you want to die with your mind in 
 such a racket that you have had no time to think? 
 Well, perhaps our minds should never be so; and 
 yet it is difficult for them not to be so when the 
 world presses on one at every turn, and consid- 
 erations of family, of friends, of work, and so 
 onaresoclamorous. Butif you have the capacity 
 for friendship with God, surely you must some- 
 times look forward to that time of peace when 
 the world will not claim so much of your time and 
 thought and energy, when you will have time to 
 think, and to be silent, and to listen to the voice 
 of God. 
 
 If that old age is possible to you, it is an old 
 age which will be an inspiration and a glory to 
 your children and your younger friends. The 
 young are generous. They are prone to hero- 
 worship. They easily make idols of those who 
 are noble and good, and though it would not be 
 natural or right for the young always to desire 
 
OLD AGE 49 
 
 the society of the old, there are old people whom 
 they instinctively desire sometimes to be with. 
 Surely we have all known some such—some old 
 man or woman—whose spirit was so youthful, 
 and whose charm so great, through their wisdom, 
 their gentleness, their tolerance, their interest 
 in the world’s progress, that it was a delight to 
 be with them. Perhaps the real bitterness of old 
 age is the fear of being useless, the feeling that 
 you are no longer any use in the world: but can 
 these feel they are no use? There is no inspira- 
 tion so glorious as a beautiful old age. That you 
 should be able to keep your ideals through all 
 the fever and fret of life, and still hold them, and 
 believe in them, and send us out with them on a 
 great quest, that is glorious! Our ideals, the 
 ideals of the middle-aged and the ideals of 
 the young, are cheap compared with yours. The 
 young have not yet fought for them. They have 
 not bled for them. They do not know yet 
 whether they really believeinthem. They cannot 
 know—none of us can know till we have put it to 
 the proof, how much of our idealism is true, how 
 much based on the rock. But if you can still 
 be sure of God, if you can still believe in man, if 
 your ideals are still rooted firm through all the 
 tempest, what an inspiration are you to the 
 younger generation! You give us faith; you 
 give us confidence; you give us courage, because 
 we see in you a faith that has borne the heat and 
 
50 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 stress of the day, and at the end is stronger than 
 at the beginning. You have fought the good 
 fight. You have carried through and carried on 
 until the end. And in the world there is no 
 greater service than this. You pass now from 
 things temporal to things eternal, and your 
 passing becomes the oriflamme to those who 
 follow. 
 
 There. is a passage at the end of Bunyan’s 
 ‘‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’’ where he describes the 
 land of Beulah, which is old age, where the pil- 
 grims rest awhile before they cross the river of 
 death. 
 
 “This river,’”’ he says, “‘has been a terror to many; 
 yea, the thoughts of it, also, have often frightened 
 me: but now, methinks, I stand easy; my foot is fixed 
 upon that on which the feet of the priests that bare 
 the ark of the covenant stood while Israel went over 
 this Jordan. The waters, indeed, are to the palate 
 bitter, and to the stomach cold, yet the thoughts of 
 what I am going to, and of the convoy that wait for 
 me on the other side, lie as a glowing coal at my heart.” 
 
 Then there comes that wonderful description of 
 the soul crossing the river of death. 
 
 “Then,” said he, “I am going to my Father’s; 
 and though with great difficulty I have got hither, 
 yet now I do not repent me of all the troubles I have 
 been at to arrive where I am. . . .’’ When the 
 day that he must go hence was come, many accom- 
 
OLD AGE 5I 
 
 panied him to the riverside, into which as he went he 
 said, ‘‘Death, where is thy sting?’”’ And as he went 
 down deeper, he said, ‘‘Grave, where is thy victory?” 
 So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for 
 him on the other side. 
 
ON BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 
 
 FEW years ago a great London doctor was 
 walking through one of the mean streets of 
 a poor part of London, when he noticed in a 
 window an announcement of an exhibition where 
 there was to be seen for the price of a shilling an 
 extraordinarily deformed and terrible human 
 being. He was called ‘‘the Elephant Man,” and 
 Sir Frederick Treves, having a moment’s leisure, 
 paid his shilling and went in. 
 
 He has told us the story of what he saw and 
 what followed in a book which I for one have not 
 got the courage to read. One’s mind sickens at 
 the thought of what life must have meant to that 
 man. But I read, as perhaps many of you did, 
 a review of the book, and the reviewer briefly 
 tells the story. He tells how Sir Frederick Treves 
 went into the shop and was conducted to a room 
 with a curtain hanging across it. The curtain 
 was drawn by the exploiter of this unhappy 
 human curiosity, and Sir Frederick Treves saw 
 behind it a shapeless form, crouching under a 
 kind of loose cover. His exploiter ordered him 
 to get up and show himself, and he stood up and 
 
 52 
 
ON BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 53 
 
 dropped his covering. Sir Frederick Treves then 
 saw a man so hideously deformed that the review- 
 er, having embarked on a descriptive quotation, 
 suddenly breaks off and says, ‘‘Let us leave it at 
 that.” 
 
 Sir Frederick Treves did not know what to 
 do or how to help, but on the impulse of the 
 moment, gave his card to the Elephant Man and 
 left him, telling him if he ever wanted him, to 
 send for him. Then he went away, and, I sup- 
 pose, for a while forgot about it. 
 
 It appears, however, that shortly afterwards, 
 the police put a stop to the exhibition, and the 
 exhibitionist took his unhappy prey to Belgium 
 and exhibited him again there; but almost at 
 once the police again stepped in, and he was 
 forbidden to continue the exhibition. Coming to 
 the conclusion that no money was to be made any 
 more out of the Elephant Man, he seems to have 
 put him on board ship for England with a ticket 
 for London. As the reviewer says, one hesitates 
 to imagine what that journey could have been 
 like, but the man somehow got to London. 
 There his courage failed him altogether and he 
 tried to hide himself in the station. He was 
 found by some of the officials, and they discovered 
 Sir Frederick Treves’ card still on him and rang 
 him up to ask if he knew anything about the man. 
 
 Sir Frederick came down to the station and 
 took that man home to his house, and there he 
 
54 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 lived for the few years that he had left—I think, 
 if I remember rightly, that he died at the age of 
 26. During the last two or three years of his 
 life, while he was living in Sir Frederick Treves’ 
 house, he had a room to himself; he was never 
 seen by any human being unless he actually 
 desired it; and he had an hour or so in the evening 
 when he could go into the garden under Sir 
 Frederick’s absolute promise that no one else 
 would be there. Queen Alexandra (who surely 
 will have an extra star in her crown some day 
 for this!) once—no, not once, but several times— 
 went and sat with him and took his hand. She 
 gave the man her photograph; he put it on the 
 mantelpiece and, as Sir Frederick tells us, he 
 practically worshipped it. And during those 
 last two or three years he said more than once 
 that he was ‘“‘happy every hour of the day.” 
 Happy! 
 
 He was a man, Sir Frederick tells us, of a 
 sensitive nature, of intelligence above the average. 
 You would not have wondered, would you— 
 indeed, you would almost have expected—that 
 a man’s spirit, enclosed in such a prison, would 
 become as deformed as his body; would be 
 poisoned with hatred against a world which had 
 been to him hell. But it was not so. He was 
 happy every hour of the day. And he had nothing, 
 absolutely nothing, of the things that make us 
 happy. No work, no gift with which he could 
 
ON BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 55 
 
 serve the world, no sense that he was of value to 
 anyone, no wife, no child, no equality in friend- 
 ship, no sense that he could give anything to 
 anybody; just an absence of torture. And he 
 was happy—‘‘happy every hour of the day.”’ Is 
 there not something sublime in the human spirit 
 that could remain serene and gentle under so 
 terrible a fate? Go through such a hell of torment 
 unembittered? Be willing to be happy when 
 active torment ceased, and bear—it seems—no 
 angry resentment, no venomous or sullen hate 
 for what was past? I wish he could know— 
 perhaps he does know—that to those who have 
 not even perhaps read the book but have just 
 heard of him, there is a fragrance in the memory 
 of that touching capacity and willingness to be 
 happy, which might almost make him think his 
 life had been worth living. 
 
 And some of us are sorry for ourselves! 
 
 Well, you may say, his suffering does not make 
 it any easier for us to suffer! His was a fate, 
 indeed, beyond imagination for terror and pity, 
 but after all that does not make it any easier for 
 us! Perhaps, in a way, the very sensitiveness 
 that makes us feel for such agony only makes the 
 world seem a more terrible place. That he suf- 
 fered more than we do ought not to make it easier 
 to suffer: it only makes it the more terrible to 
 live in a world that contains such agony. If we 
 are disappointed, or ill, or out of work, or unsuc- 
 
56 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 cessful, or unloved, the fact that this man had 
 worse things to bear does not really make our 
 load any lighter. 
 
 No, it does not. I do not want to pretend 
 that it does. I know that, on the contrary, toa 
 sensitive soul, it often makes the world seem 
 more horrible still that such a depth of suffering 
 should be endured in it. But the point I want 
 to make is this. This man had nothing; so far 
 as we can see, absolutely nothing. Only the 
 memory of unspeakable torture. Yet he was 
 happy. If, therefore, he could be happy in such 
 a case, to be sorry for ourselves is not inevitable. 
 It is not due to outward circumstance. It is a 
 vice of the mind. It is an ignoble temper. It 
 is a mean cowardice in the face of pain. It 
 cannot be our circumstances that make us sorry 
 for ourselves, if it is possible for such a being as 
 this man ever to be happy. 
 
 If you think of the people who are sorry for 
 themselves—perhaps if you are honest you will 
 see that that class occasionally includes you!— 
 if you think of the people who are sorry for them- 
 selves, are they not just as often people who have 
 much to make them happy, as people who have, 
 as this man, everything to make them sad? 
 
 I do not know a person who is more sorry for 
 himself when he is a little bit ill than a person 
 who has always been well. Let a person have 
 practically perfect health, and the resentment 
 
ON BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 57 
 
 that he feels when he has a cold or a fit of indiges- 
 tion, would cause you to think that all his life 
 had been one long agony of disease. But that, 
 too, is not invariable. You will sometimes come 
 across the person who is very strong and well as a 
 rule, and who will cheerfully say, when he is ill, 
 “Well, after all I have had an extraordinarily 
 good time hitherto. I have been most fortunate. 
 I have no cause to complain.” 
 
 ‘“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, 
 but in ourselves,”’ that we are thus or thus. 
 
 You know people who have some slight disap- 
 pointment, some little failure, some crumpled 
 rose-leaf. What an uproar they make about it! 
 It blots out the sun for them; it blackens the sky. 
 They have been so accustomed to prosperity 
 that they do not know how to tolerate the injury 
 and the injustice of having occasionally to suffer 
 like other people. On the other hand, you know 
 people who have indeed been buffeted by the 
 world, who are most buffeted and most gay in 
 spirit. . 
 
 Some of you here will still remember Miss 
 Lisette Caldecott, a member of this congregation 
 since we began at Kensington Town Hall. She 
 died a little while ago. She was very badly off; 
 she lived alone; she was terribly lame; she suf- 
 fered from an affection of the bones which crippled 
 her hands and every movement, as well as her 
 legs and feet. Her chief joy in life was to play the 
 
58 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 piano, and her hands became gradually so crippled 
 that she could not play. Her other joy was to 
 sketch, and she gradually became so blind that 
 that went also. She was deaf. I hardly know, 
 in my experience, of a more tormented human 
 body; and I never found her sorry for herself. 
 She looked forward to such trifling little pleasures 
 with a spirit and gaiety which were full of charm. 
 One by one, all the things that she cared for were 
 taken from her, but her spirit was as dauntlessly 
 gay as when she had them all. That a member 
 or two of our congregation—some of the younger 
 ones in the Auxiliary Choir—used to take her to 
 her omnibus, and meet her when she came here, 
 was to her the most heavenly piece of kindliness. 
 She had everything to complain of, and she never 
 complained. She never gave you the impression 
 that she was with a heroic courage suppressing 
 her complaints. Not a bit! She gave you the 
 impression that she really enjoyed her life. She 
 did enjoy it. 
 
 Of course, you know people who suffer as she 
 did and who are exceedingly sorry for themselves. 
 Some of those who are sorry for themselves have, 
 in a sense, every right to be so. But the thing 
 that has struck me, who hears, perhaps, rather a 
 lot about people’s griefs, is that this habit of being 
 sorry for oneself does not seem to have any con- 
 nection whatever with circumstances. You will 
 find it in people who have every reason to com- 
 
ON BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 59 
 
 plain: you will find it in people who have none: 
 and because it is so independent of actual cir- 
 cumstances, I am forced to the conclusion that 
 it is not due to circumstances: it is a vice in the 
 mind itself. 
 
 Indeed, it zs a vice, and rather a bad one. It 
 means that you are focussing your thoughts upon 
 yourself. If you were to turn your mind out- 
 ward you would see people who are gay and gallant 
 in the face of misfortunes which, set down in cold 
 blood, make an apparently overwhelming list; 
 people with such a dauntless spirit that to the 
 end they will be gay; people who have neither 
 health nor influence nor money. ‘There is some- 
 thing they will always have, these gallant spirits 
 who have apparently nothing—no success, no 
 particular talent, no wealth, no health—and yet 
 who will extort from life its joy, and make of 
 life so gallant a thing that they always have 
 friends. For to such a spirit friendship is drawn, 
 while we, when we are sorry for ourselves, repel 
 it. The world may have a rough and ready 
 judgment, but it is not fond of the coward and the 
 skulker. It is not fond of people who have a 
 perpetual sense of their own grievances. And 
 it is right. Fundamentally it is right, for this 
 -vice of self-pity is most demoralising, most 
 disintegrating. Do not indulge, even for a little 
 while, in the pleasant pastime of considering 
 your own grievances and reflecting how odious 
 
60 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 everybody is to you, for to do so is to waste your 
 strength. 
 
 You wake up in the morning, and you think, 
 perhaps, ‘‘I won’t get up for five minutes.”” You 
 spend that time in considering what an odious 
 day you are going to have. You will find that 
 half an hour has gone like a flash in the considera- 
 tion of that exquisite subject, yourself and your 
 grievances! Half an hour is gone in a flash, and 
 it does not leave you merely half an hour late: it 
 leaves you demoralised and disintegrated. The 
 psychologist who warns you against daydreams 
 was never more right than when your dreams 
 are of your own grievances. Such dreams result 
 in moral disintegration; they take away your 
 courage; they take away hope and leave you 
 demoralised, anxious, cowardly. The world is 
 too strong for you. Is it? Yet it was not too 
 strong for that deformed, tormented man. The 
 world is cruel to you. Is it a hundredth part as 
 cruel as it was to him? Yet how swiftly his spirit 
 reacted to the first touch of kindness! With how 
 little resentment he brooded on the past! He 
 put it away from him. It was the present in 
 which he lived, because the present was kind to 
 him; as I have known the same kind of spirit live 
 in the future, because the future may be kind. 
 
 It is true that that attitude of resentment 
 against the world repels the world. There is 
 nothing the world loves better—and here again 
 
ON BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 61 
 
 it is right—than a gallant spirit, and after all, 
 how can we know what lies behind the face of 
 someone who takes life so gaily? How do you 
 know? Behind any face that you see there may 
 lie—so often there does lie—something terribly 
 difficult, not necessarily tragic, though often it 
 is tragic, too. But again and again when I have 
 learnt to know someone whose outside life seemed 
 quite smooth, quite prosperous, perhaps even 
 specially so, I have marvelled at the precipice 
 edge of difficulty upon which they are, in fact, 
 walking—the nervous strain, the difficulty, the 
 anxiety, perhaps the ill-health, the unknown 
 suffering. You cannot tell of any of those who 
 seetn gallant and gay, how difficult their life is, 
 how easily they might pity themselves, if they 
 chose. I am not speaking of any one of you. I 
 am speaking of your neighbour! It is not behind 
 you that this tragedy lies, but perhaps behind the 
 person who is sitting next to you! I am not 
 speaking of myself, for a million times when I 
 have fallen into this bog of being sorry for myself 
 I have found the very next person I meet is some- 
 one before whose difficulties I shrink appalled, 
 and am amazed at the courage and gaiety with 
 which they face them. It is not that they are 
 not sensitive. It is not that they do not suffer. 
 As Sir Frederick Treves'said of this ‘‘Elephant 
 Man,” he had a spirit sensitive beyond the aver- 
 age. But with that sensitiveness there is a 
 
62 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 refusal to look inward and to brood over one’s 
 wrongs. 
 
 Who cannot find grievances if they like? It 
 is inthe spirit that the difference lies. There are 
 no circumstances of any person in this hall which 
 are so ghastly as those of the man with whom I 
 began, and yet he was happy. It is therefore 
 possible to be happy, however cruel the world 
 has been to you. It is possible to turn your gaze 
 outward and, at the first touch of self-pity, to 
 turn and see how others need that pity which 
 you are wasting upon yourself. 
 
 I could not ask Dr. Dearmer to-night to read 
 the whole story of the Crucifixion from all the 
 four gospels, and yet I wished I could; the story 
 of the Crucifixion, not on Good Friday only, but 
 from Thursday night, when our Lord was first of 
 all betrayed with a kiss by a man whom he must 
 have loved, since for three years, perhaps, he had 
 been, or seemed to be, his friend. Then came the 
 sight of all his friends leaving him in flight; then 
 he was seized by the Roman soldiers, dragged 
 from one court to another—from Caiaphas to 
 Annas, to Herod, to Pontius Pilate; all through 
 that night buffeted, beaten, insulted, spat upon; 
 betrayed by his dearest friends, by the crowd— 
 the crowd he had benefited and served; and then 
 at last, in extreme physical exhaustion, carrying 
 his cross, surrounded by those cruel, hating faces 
 to the end. - 
 
ON BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 63 
 
 At last his eye falls upon some who wept for 
 him. Who could have claimed their tears more 
 than this Jesus? ‘‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep 
 not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your 
 children.” Then a little later, they nail him to 
 the Cross, and he says, ‘‘Father, forgive them. 
 They know not what they do.” Then the thief 
 appeals to him and he says, ‘‘To-day thou shalt 
 be with me in Paradise.”” ‘Then his eye falls upon 
 his mother and his friends, and he thinks of them 
 also. The daughters of Jerusalem—that fickle 
 city; the executioners who torture him; the thief 
 upon the Cross who began by deriding him; his 
 mother and his friends—all of them had his sym- 
 pathy, his understanding, his pity. Not to one 
 does he refuse to respond. To each of them he 
 says the one understanding thing which shows 
 that the last person he was thinking about was 
 himself. And he had all the sorrows of the world 
 upon him. 
 
 Not until the last provision is made for those 
 who loved him does our Lord speak or think of 
 himself. ‘“‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for 
 me.” In all the agony of suffering and grief, of 
 physical exhaustion and apparent failure,’ it is 
 still possible so deeply and truly to love others 
 that you can find no time to pity yourself. 
 
ON BEING A FAILURE 
 
 O-NIGHT I am preaching about real failure: 
 not about those whose lives, whatever the 
 world may think of them, are not failures at all, 
 but successes. Those people do not need my 
 advice: they are with God. But the rest of us, 
 who either have not excelled as we should like to 
 excel in our work; or who have failed the people 
 that we live with; who realise that we are not 
 what we might have been; that we really might 
 have done and might have been a great deal 
 better than we are—who are, in fact, failures in 
 the truest sense—want help much more than 
 they. We know what the world, perhaps, does 
 not know—what a failure we really are. We 
 know how much better we might have done—a 
 thousand times—than we have. The world sees 
 what we achieve, perhaps, and admires and praises, 
 and the world very likely is right. But we see 
 what we do not achieve; we see all the times that 
 we let opportunities pass; we know we might 
 have done and been a great deal better than we 
 have. 
 Sometimes we all see ourselves clearly. The 
 64 
 
ON BEING A FAILURE 65 
 
 fact that some of us have excelled in the world’s 
 eyes does not matter. What does matter is our 
 own devastating sense of failure. Think of the 
 people we live with, whom we might have made, 
 perhaps not perfectly happy, but a great deal 
 happier, than we have! Perhaps they are dis- 
 agreeable people; perhaps they do not really 
 appreciate us or know how charming we are 
 really! All the same, we might have been a little 
 pleasanter to live with than we have been. Per- 
 haps they are very trying people indeed. Some 
 of you, I know, do live with trying people. Yet 
 when you see yourself quite clearly, though it is 
 not all your fault, you feel you might have tried 
 a little harder. You might have put just one 
 more ounce into it. Or your work—the work, 
 that perhaps you did not choose and do not like, 
 yet for some reason you cannot get away from— 
 you shuffle through it anyhow. It is not fair, 
 you feel, that you should be put to work you 
 cannot do well. But all the same, if you cannot 
 get away from it, cannot get away from the un- 
 congenial people you live with, cannot get away 
 from some tie, or bond, or duty that is making 
 life very drab and difficult and hard for you—if 
 you cannot, you might put a little more into the 
 business of making the best of it, might you not? 
 
 Get out of it, if it is really the wrong work for 
 you—if you can. If you are really living with 
 the wrong people, get out of it—if you can. But 
 
66 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 there are some claims you cannot get out of, 
 without walking over somebody else’s body. 
 And so you do not. You are bound; and you 
 feel all the time a deep resentment against life, 
 a feeling that people are not fair to you, and that 
 the world has not been fair to you. But when 
 you see yourself quite clearly, you know you could 
 have done a little better than you have and 
 there comes over you a desolating sense of 
 failure. 
 
 Take hold of your life again. Take hold of it 
 now, to-night, that hateful job, or those difficult 
 surroundings, or those odious people. Take hold 
 of life again, and see how far the fault is in you. 
 If even once you suddenly see that it has been a 
 little your fault, begin by accepting the fact. 
 Accept the fact that you have failed. After all, 
 99 per cent. of us have. Whatever we may look 
 like to the world, whether we look hopelessly 
 inefficient, or brilliantly successful, 99 per cent. 
 of us know that according to our own measure 
 of ourselves we have failed. Let us forget for a 
 moment all the faults that belong to the other 
 people. Do not let us pretend any more that it 
 is entirely their fault. Let us think of the little 
 bit—perhaps a very little bit in the case of some, 
 but that bit that zs your fault, accept. Do not 
 let us pretend it is just a “high failure’ and 
 better than ‘“‘low success.’””’ We are not to 
 choose between high failure and low success; we 
 
ON BEING A FAILURE 67 
 
 are to choose between low failure and high success. 
 The theory that, after all, we have tried very 
 hard, and perhaps in the sight of God are more 
 successful than we seem to ourselves, is often a 
 demoralising one. If you have got it into your 
 head that you are a failure because you are too 
 good for this world, get it out again. You would 
 not believe how often people tell me that they 
 are too good for their lives! They fail, they 
 think, ‘‘because they are too kind,’’ when it is 
 really only because they are too anxious to have 
 people fond of them. They believe they are 
 too large-minded to notice the small troubles of 
 which other people make so much, when really 
 they are only too thick-skinned to notice them. 
 They are so high-minded that they walk over the 
 bodies of other people, and never even see what 
 they are doing. If God were so high-minded 
 that he could not trouble himself about your two- 
 penny-halfpenny troubles and mine he would 
 walk right over us, would he not? 
 
 Sometimes we think we are too sensitive. We 
 cannot help losing our tempers and being irritable, 
 because we are so sensitive, much, much more 
 sensitive than the coarse-natured people we have 
 to live with. It is not that we are too sensitive 
 really; it is that we are not strong enough. It is 
 not that we are too good for this world; it is that 
 we have not got ordinary common sense. Over 
 and over again one thinks—I have a hundred 
 
68 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 times—that it is because one is really too good, 
 too courageous, or too honest, that one finds the 
 world against him. It is a dangerous excuse. 
 It is more likely that we have not taken trouble 
 enough; that we have not been brave enough; or 
 that we have not taken the trouble to imagine 
 what other people are feeling. Even if the things 
 that worry them and do not happen to worry us 
 are very little things, we may be sure that the 
 things that do worry us are small enough, too. 
 We might be patient, even when little trifling 
 difficulties arise. Ours must look small enough 
 to God. 
 
 Abandon the idea that we have failed through 
 too much goodness: but accept the fact that we 
 have failed. Accept it. Take your life as it is. 
 Accept it as it is, and cease from thinking how 
 splendid you would be if only things were different. 
 Take a good look and start again. ‘‘Oh, but,” 
 you say, ‘‘some of us can’t. We have lost oppor- 
 tunities that will never come back to us.’”’ True: 
 but we have our new ones coming, coming to- 
 night, coming to-morrow. Perhaps they are 
 not so attractive as the old ones you lost, but 
 they are still opportunities, and are coming all 
 the time, and pass you in a stream. Forget the 
 ones that are behind. Forget the ones that you 
 have lost, and do not turn round to look after 
 and bewail them. You have lost them. Very 
 well; they are lost. Put them out of your mind. 
 
: 
 
 ON BEING A FAILURE 69 
 
 For while you are bewailing those you have lost, 
 others are passing you. 
 
 Perhaps you have hurt someone irrevocably. 
 Perhaps your failure has involved other people. 
 Perhaps you have hurt them morally. Now 
 they have passed out of your reach, and you 
 cannot get them back to help them. ‘They have 
 gone, and they are damaged. It was you who 
 damaged them, and you cannot undo it. Very 
 well. But there are people round you now. 
 Need you damage them, too? Those people 
 whom we have hurt, whose self-respect, perhaps, 
 we have destroyed, whose courage we have taken 
 away, whose faith in human nature we have 
 shaken, perhaps God, in his infinite mercy, will 
 give them back to us some day to help; but if not, 
 still all round us there are human beings with 
 very little self-respect, very little courage, very 
 little joy in the world. While you are bewailing 
 the ones whom you have damaged, you are casting 
 a cloud over the ones who are coming to you. 
 There are people coming to you to-night, to- 
 morrow, all the time. While they are there, 
 all around you, forget the ones that you have 
 damaged. Or if that is impossible, at least take 
 joy in the fact that all the time a crowd of human 
 beings is round you and passing you. The evil 
 that you did you cannot undo, indeed, but you 
 can redeem it by never damaging other people. 
 Help them while you can, and be joyful in their 
 
70 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 joy, and sympathise with their sorrow, and do 
 not hurt, or damage, or destroy. 
 
 Perhaps it is yourself that is damaged. We- 
 cannot be failures all the time, or even a great 
 deal of the time, without our failure having an 
 effect on our character. The horrible part of it 
 is that if we lose opportunities, we ourselves are 
 damaged. We are not the fine people we might 
 have been. If we had always put that last ounce 
 into our effort we should have grown into some- 
 thing fine; and we have not. We have shrunk 
 into something much less fine than we might 
 have been. We have not got the power; we 
 have not got the insight; we have not got the 
 knowledge and the wisdom that a finer experience 
 would have brought us. If we have slipped along 
 from one failure to another, or from one poor, 
 miserable little success to another, we have at 
 last no power to do the great things that we might 
 have done if we had always done our best. 
 
 Well, but you are still there! You are still 
 alive! You are not dead! Begin again, from 
 where you are now. Forget to wring your hands 
 for what you might have been. I dare to say 
 forget it, perhaps, because I know in my heart 
 that you cannot forget it. But at least do not 
 spend your time cursing yourself because you 
 are not the great person that God knows you 
 might have been if you had always put your 
 mind to his service. The fact that you are still 
 
ON BEING A FAILURE 71 
 
 alive gives you opportunities. The fact that you 
 are still there is your chance. If you have defin- 
 itely descended from a high plane on which you 
 once lived and moved, if you can see that you 
 are not—I will not say what you hoped to be— 
 but even what you once actually were, start on 
 that lower plane. You are there. Start there. 
 Do not waste your time going any lower. Start 
 where you are, and do not think it is noble or 
 praiseworthy to be wringing your hands and curs- 
 ing yourself for what cannot now be helped. 
 Wherever you are, whether you drink, or take 
 drugs, or steal, or whether you are only guilty of 
 ordinary ‘‘respectable sins,’’ like deceit, and 
 insincerity, and selfishness, and jealousy—where- 
 ever you are, start there. You are still alive. - 
 Begin again, however difficult it is. 
 
 You have lost your time at school, and you 
 will never now have a decent education. You 
 have lost your time at college, perhaps; you did 
 not realise how precious it was, and it is gone. 
 You have not read the books you should have 
 read or prepared yourself for your work as you 
 should have done, and though perhaps you 
 scraped through your examinations, that does 
 not amount to very much. Or you are getting 
 older, and the generous enthusiasm of youth has 
 left you. Perhaps you are getting middle-aged, 
 and it seems asifit really istoolatenow. Perhaps 
 you are more than elderly—you are getting old. 
 
72 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 There are only a few years left to you. It does 
 not matter. You are an immortal spirit, and 
 before you stretches eternity. There is no point 
 in your life at which you shall say, ‘“There I give 
 it up: I cannot now do anything.”’ If you are 
 sixteen, or sixty, or a hundred and sixty, it does 
 * not matter. You are an immortal spirit. Do not 
 give yourself up, but start again. All eternity 
 before you, and you only on the threshold of it, 
 whatever your years are in this world! 
 
 You will have to go back some day and undo all 
 the harm you do. You will have to retrace your 
 steps some day and do again what you have done 
 wrong. You must at last retrace with bleeding 
 feet the path on which you now go from failure 
 ‘to failure. ‘‘As a man soweth, so shall he also 
 reap.”’ 
 
 But if you take your immortality as a divine 
 inheritance, if to you it is a great thing, and a 
 glory, it is because you are now beginning to 
 retrace your steps, and it is glorious to think that 
 you have eternity in which to grow Godlike. Do 
 not make of that eternal inheritance a curse, by 
 going further and further down, for the time must 
 come when you will retrace your steps and go up 
 again. Why not start now? 
 
 Believe me, if you do, if you just take hold 
 of your life and look at it in cold blood, and do 
 not think of all the excuses that could be made 
 for you—for what comfort are they really?— 
 
ON BEING A FAILURE 73 
 
 you will triumph. You do not want excuses, 
 do you? You want to triumph; you want to 
 excel; you want to know that you have taken 
 your life and made what you will out of it. Very 
 well, then. Do not look for excuses. They do 
 not really comfort. They do not really explain. 
 Look at your life dispassionately, and see what 
 can be done with it now. 
 
 Suppose you are going to give up your job. 
 Suppose you have only another month of it. 
 Suppose in a little while you are going to leave 
 your home and go somewhere where you expect 
 more congenial companionship than you have 
 ever had; if you have only a day left of your work 
 or your home, make that day a glorious thing. 
 Put the whole of your power into it. You will 
 find that having done that gives you such a sense 
 of power that you will begin to know that there 
 is a power in the universe that could make a 
 success out of any life. 
 
 That is what I believe. I believe there is power 
 to make of any life a success. If you are forced 
 to stay where you are, there is power enough in 
 the universe for you to make out of that sordid, 
 cramped, uninteresting life, something absolutely 
 glorious. 
 
 The more I think of Christ on the cross, the 
 more I am penetrated by the sense that he must 
 have felt he had failed. You perhaps will retort, 
 “Yes, hut then he had not.’ True, he had not 
 
74 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 but I think he felt he had. I do not believe that 
 anything short of that shattering sense that 
 everything had failed could have wrung from 
 Christ that awful cry, ‘‘My God, why hast thou 
 forsaken me?’’ The most that most of us could 
 say is, ‘‘Why have I forsaken thee?”” But Christ, 
 whose one appeal was to love, and whose one 
 answer on Good Friday was—or so it seemed— 
 that everything had failed, cried out, ‘‘Why hast 
 thou forsaken me?”’ 
 
 Do you know, although this is one of those 
 things one hardly dares to speak about, I think 
 Christ accepted his failure and trusted it to God 
 to do what he could with it. ‘‘It is finished. 
 Father, into thy hands I trust my spirit.” Do 
 you, who strive, so many of you, in such difficult 
 lives, who have so much, some of you, to contend 
 with, do you also believe that, if you trust your 
 spirit to God, power will come into your life which 
 will transfigure it? 
 
 You have the power of God to help you in all 
 those difficulties and perplexities, that devastating 
 sense of failure, of advancing age, perhaps, of 
 passing time, of lost opportunity, of spoilt life. 
 The power of God can triumph over all that and 
 make of it something glorious. It is about us, 
 as the energy of the sun is about us, that streams 
 past this world of ours, and we do not use a bil- 
 lionth part of it. So is it with the power of God. 
 It strearns past us, and we do not use one billionth 
 
ON BEING A FAILURE 75 
 
 part of it, but if, setting aside all our regrets, all our 
 excuses, we were to begin once more the battle, we 
 should find the power of God coming to us to 
 triumph. 
 
 God grant it to you. God grant it to us all. 
 
EASY WAYS OF BEING GOOD 
 
 HERE are no easy ways of being good. I 
 could preach a very short sermon to-night! 
 But there are easy ways of feeling good, and I 
 am rather up against them just now. There are 
 ways, quite easy ways, of feeling good, of pre- 
 serving one’s self-respect, of preserving the respect 
 of others, and even believing that one is being 
 good. 
 
 Most of us want to be good. Almost everyone 
 perhaps. I believe Mr. Clutton Brock is right 
 when he says that goodness and beauty and truth 
 are things naturally desired by human beings. 
 We do not need to say why we want beauty, or 
 why we want truth; the normal human being 
 wants them, because they are fundamentally 
 desirable—desirable in themselves. In just the 
 same way nine hundred and ninety-nine people 
 out of a thousand actually want to be good, but 
 most of them do not want it to the exclusion of 
 everything else. We want it, but we want other 
 things as well. And when we think of wanting 
 to be good, we are rather inclined, I think, to 
 think of the exciting side of being good—the emo- 
 
 76 
 
EASY WAYS OF BEING GOOD 77 
 
 tion, and the vision, and the thrill, the excitement, 
 the heroism, the romance. 
 
 Moreover, most of us want to preserve our 
 self-respect. It is difficult to preserve one’s 
 self-respect unless one thinks one is at least as 
 good as other people, and unless one can believe 
 that one does really, on the whole, want to be 
 good. And there are ways—quite easy ways— 
 of achieving all these things. 
 
 The thrill, and the vision, and the romance, 
 and even the self-respect are quite easy to attain. 
 You can feel good by going to church and singing 
 sentimental hymns. The more sentimental they 
 are, generally speaking, I think, the more good 
 you feel. Hymns about being sawn asunder, 
 slain with the sword; hymns about your intense 
 desire to die and go to heaven; hymns about the 
 awful weariness of life that you feel, sung in a 
 constant succession in church, will send you away 
 in that spirit of exhausted emotions and con- 
 sequent crossness which is thought suitable after 
 a great spiritual experience. Unfortunately, for 
 us, Mr. Martin Shaw has torn that pleasure from 
 a great many of us, and converted it into a sorrow. 
 I used to enjoy these things as much as any body, 
 and I cannot now. But I can well remember the 
 joy of singing sentimental Rites and feeling as 
 good as gold. 
 
 Then there is another way. If Mr. Martin 
 Shaw, or anyone else, has taken from you that 
 
78 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 pleasure, you can feel something of the same 
 thrill, not quite so easily but with an even greater 
 sense of superiority, by doing what people call 
 ‘‘worshipping under the blue dome of heaven.” 
 These people, I believe, are now very generally 
 known as “‘blue domers.’’ They eschew churches 
 and places where other people meet, and go out 
 into the country instead. They sit on top of a 
 hill and worship under the blue dome of heaven. 
 I have done that too; and I trust I shall do it 
 again. The best time to do it is on Sunday, some 
 time between six and seven o’clock, because then 
 you can almost always hear church bells in the 
 distance and reflect on the fact that you are not 
 going to church and that quite a large number of 
 mentally deficient people are. There is nothing 
 that adds more to a sense of goodness than that 
 feeling. A very distinguished English divine 
 remarked once, when he heard the church bells in 
 the distance, that the one pleasure that never 
 palled was the pleasure of not going to church. 
 And when you can combine with that the feeling 
 that you are engaged in something far superior, 
 then naturally there is no limit to the goodness 
 that you can feel. 
 
 I belong to both these schools, or I did, and I 
 am still something of a blue domer. I wish we 
 could arrange either the weather or the churches 
 so that when there really was a blue dome— 
 which there has not been very often this month— 
 
EASY WAYS OF BEING GOOD 79 
 
 one could go and worship God there. Certainly 
 there are times when one is the better for worship- 
 ping him alone and in the beauty of nature rather 
 than elsewhere. But it is apt to add to the feeling 
 that it is quite easy to be good. 
 
 Then, again, it is quite easy, I think, to pre- 
 serve one’s self-respect. Perhaps some of you 
 do not know how to do that, so I will tell you, 
 and you will not be able to say you came to 
 church for nothing to-night! The easy way to 
 do it is always to keep an open mind about every- 
 thing. Goafter every new religion, read every new 
 book, discuss every new question and every 
 old one, and all the time suspend your judgment 
 and keep anopen mind. Itisa highly respectable 
 attitude and it saves you an infinity of trouble 
 because, you see, you need never act. Your 
 mind is still open, your judgment is still suspended, 
 and while you compliment yourself on the intel- 
 lectual integrity which forbids you to come to a 
 hasty conclusion, you need—indeed, you must 
 —do nothing. You take no risks; you make no 
 mistakes; you fall into none of those ridiculous 
 misadventures which befall people who make up 
 their minds. Neither are you forced to reflect 
 that perhaps you would not act even if you had 
 made up yourmind. You can cherish throughout 
 life the pleasant delusion that you would have 
 acted like a hero if only you had been able to 
 decide what to do. You can marvel that other 
 
80 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 people, who do seem to have decided, are so often 
 deplorably cowardly about acting. You would 
 not be so; you, if you had made up your mind, 
 would immediately act upon it. But you cannot 
 make up your mind. Your judgment is in sus- 
 pense. 
 
 So, if you are interested in social reform, or in 
 Christianity, or in any great question, you go 
 from book to book and from conference to con- 
 ference, always with an open mind, always trying 
 to decide what is the right thing to aim at and 
 the right thing to do. I have heard people say 
 over and over again—people who never do one 
 single thing, good or bad—‘‘I only want to do 
 what is right, but I cannot see what is right.” I 
 often think, ‘‘How fortunate youare!”’ -If you had 
 had seen what was right, perhaps you would have 
 to do.it; and if you did not do it you would 
 have had to face the fact that you are a coward 
 and a skulker. How fortunate you are that you 
 have such an open mind, that you can never 
 decide just what zs the right thing to do! 
 
 I sometimes think that books and study circles 
 and conferences are to some of us as much a form 
 of dope as a sentimental hymn. As long as we 
 are going to conferences about social questions, 
 we convince ourselves that at least we are doing 
 our best to see what is the right thing to do; 
 though, it is true, we rush from one conference 
 to another conference and yet are never able to 
 
EASY WAYS OF BEING GOOD 81 
 
 make up our minds. We go from leader to leader, 
 we bewail the inability of modern prophets to 
 give usa lead at all. At the end of the conference 
 or the sermon, or the book, or the discussion, we 
 still do not know how to act. 
 
 The truth is that it is difficult to act. It is 
 hard to act; it is hard to be good. It is much 
 easier to preserve your self-respect. If we make 
 up our minds on what has to be done, we may 
 make a mistake; or we may find ourselves un- 
 willing to act after all—and that would be extra- 
 ordinarily unpleasant! We may be faced with 
 the fact that we are really stupid, or cowardly, 
 or slothful. For it is extraordinarily hard to be 
 good, although it is so easy to feel good. ‘‘The 
 kingdom of heaven is like unto a treasure hid in 
 a field, the which, when a man hath found, he 
 hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all 
 that he hath and buyeth that field.’’? 
 
 “The kingdom of heaven is like unto a mer- 
 chant man, seeking goodly pearls: who when he 
 had found one pearl of great price, went and sold 
 all that he had, and bought it.” 
 
 It really is no use trying to get the kingdom of 
 heaven for less. All these things I have spoken 
 of are helps—not the bad hymns, but the good 
 ones; the sky, and nature, and the conferences, 
 where you meet with your fellow men and women 
 who are trying to find the way to do what is right; 
 
 t Matthew XIII. 
 
82 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 but none of them will ever be able to find a way 
 for you that is easy—for there is no such way. 
 
 That is why so often we say our leaders have 
 not found a way for us; they have not found us 
 an easy way, and because we cannot help hoping 
 that after all we shall find it possible to do good 
 and to save the world, to redeem it without having 
 to “‘sell all that we have”’ and pay the price, we 
 go on muttering that we cannot make up our 
 minds. You are prepared, and I am, too, to give 
 something. I would give perhaps, quite a good 
 deal; but not all, not everything. So we go from 
 conference to conference and from class to class 
 and from book to book, hoping that at last we 
 shall find a way which will not make too great a 
 demand on us; which will not ask for that interior 
 act of entire self-renunciation which is so hard. 
 Perhaps some conjuring trick will make this 
 possible for us; or if not, perhaps we shall not be 
 asked for quite so high a price. 
 
 How human it is! So we go on hoping that 
 somebody will find for us an easy way. The new 
 psychology, or the new religion, or the new 
 thought, or the new philosophy. All of them, 
 believe me, have something to say to us. There 
 is not one that has not some message. But you 
 are hoping, and I am hoping that that message 
 will be a way in which we can be good, a way in 
 which we can make the world better, and not 
 have to give too much for it. 
 
EASY WAYS OF BEING GOOD 83 
 
 I wrote a book some time ago called ‘‘Sex and 
 Common Sense,’’ which had in it a chapter illus- 
 trating just the kind of point I am trying to make 
 to-night. I was dealing with a difficulty that 
 faces a great many people, especially the women 
 of this generation, who are not able, within the 
 four walls of our moral code, to satisfy the sex 
 side of their nature. I said that it was possible 
 so to use the creative instinct (which is what the 
 sex instinct really is) on another plane. I said 
 it was possible to transmute this tremendous 
 impulse, this hunger of sex, and use it in another 
 way, on a plane which instead of being both 
 Spiritual and physical, as sex love ought to be, 
 must be spiritual only. I claimed that it was 
 possible for a life based on this belief to be joyful 
 and full and rich and fertile; that it is not necessary 
 for us to resign ourselves to a life that is narrow 
 and cramped and sterile but that, in the deepest 
 sense of the word, it could be fruitful and glorious 
 and joyful. I pointed to our Lord as an instance 
 of one who had transmuted the whole of his 
 creative power into a spiritual energy so great 
 that no one could say of him that he was not a 
 Lover, since he was the greatest Lover the world 
 had ever seen. JI claimed that, in their degree, 
 Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, Catherine of Siena, 
 Theresa of Spain had done, and other men and 
 women can do, the same thing. Well, then, 
 people begin to write to me about this book and 
 
84 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 say, ‘‘This is a very difficult task! What are 
 men, shattered or impoverished by the war— 
 women denied their natural satisfaction—to do 
 with their sex instincts? Miss Royden says, 
 ‘Transmute it into something on another plane.’ 
 That is not an answer! It may be possible for 
 the exceptional man and woman, but we do not 
 think it is very useful of Miss Royden to point 
 the ordinary man and woman to Christ, and say, 
 ‘He was able to do it; so can you.” The ordinary 
 person is not a Christ, a Francis, a Joan of Arc, 
 and such advice, though doubtless, very beautiful, 
 is for the exceptional person. It is no answer at 
 all to most of us.” 
 
 It is no answer if you are looking for an easy 
 answer; yet it is the only answer that it is possible 
 to give. There is no other answer; there is no 
 other way out. None. This is the way out. 
 Did I ever pretend that it was an easy way? It 
 is not easy to turn any of your natural instincts 
 out of the normal, natural channel and force them 
 into another. If you think there is an easy path, 
 go and look for it. But I warn you beforehand 
 there is no such path. You can let your powér 
 run to waste if you like. You can leave the 
 world just a few degrees worse than it was because 
 you lived in it, instead of a few degrees better. 
 You can do that, but that isnot a way out. That 
 does not solve any difficulty. 
 
 Someone comes to me and asks, ‘‘Show me 
 
EASY WAYS OF BEING GOOD 85 
 
 what is the right thing to do,” and I show them 
 that path and they say, ‘‘That is not possible.”’ 
 What they mean is, ‘‘That is not easy.” Well, 
 it is not easy. God forbid that I should ever 
 deceive anyone into thinking that it iseasy. But 
 it is glorious, it is joyful, it is inspiring. It is not 
 easy; that I never promised. In your physical 
 nature there is sex; and if you do not use the 
 sexual energy in the normal, physical way, the 
 power that is there, the vitality, is absorbed into 
 your system in such a way that it gives power 
 and vitality to you. That is a physiological fact. 
 But by no degree of continence of body or chastity 
 of mind will all that power be taken up into your 
 body. Some of it must be wasted, and that is 
 hard for you to bear. There is not any way by 
 which that can be made perfectly easy to control. 
 It is precisely the same if I speak of your psycho- 
 logical nature, of that instinct to create and to 
 love, to give and to unite with those you love. 
 That impulse, that energy makes you a vital 
 being. Without it you are only half a hu- 
 man being, whether you are a man or woman. 
 With out:it you are defective, you are not 
 fully alive. Very well. That power you can 
 take up into your life and use it for all that is 
 great and creative. Christ did ‘this. So have 
 all the great saints in their degree. But not 
 all the continence and chastity in the world 
 will enable you to escape scot-free, not to suf- 
 
86 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 fer from that desire which you: cannot wholly 
 transmute. 
 
 That residue which you cannot find any way of 
 using will hurt. Be it so. Cease to seek an 
 escape. What made you think life could be 
 easy? As long as you are a living human being 
 it is not possible; but this is the only way out that 
 is glorious and joyful and powerful and full of 
 life. You cannot get power, power in the best 
 sense I mean—cheaply. You cannot save the 
 world at any easy rate. If it cost Christ the 
 crucifixion, can you do it, do you think, more 
 cheaply? No, you cannot. And the power that 
 in your body follows from a truly chaste life, the 
 power that in your spirit comes from a chastity 
 of spirit, the power that enables you to love the 
 world, to love all human beings with the great 
 love of a great lover—do you think you can get 
 that easily? Why, it is senseless, on the face of 
 it, to think so! 
 
 This world has been plunged into hell. Can 
 you pick it out as though it were a little thing? 
 The consequence of a war so hideous is hatred so 
 vile and so cruel that the world is laid waste by 
 it, and you expect someone to write a book and 
 tell you how to escape the consequences easily! 
 No, no! That is impossible. It is not easy, it is 
 only joyful. 
 
 Indeed all those new religions that preach to 
 you that joy and happiness, health and love, and 
 
EASY WAYS OF BEING GOOD 87 
 
 all good and perfect gifts, come from God are 
 right. They are most right to preach to you a 
 gospel of joy. But this joy was at the heart of 
 it an act of renunciation so complete that Christ 
 could even liken it to the crucifixion. 
 
 Go to some new class in psychology, or theoso- 
 phy, or new thought, or higher thought, or what- 
 ever you like to call it; and they will give to you 
 a message of joy. They are all of them right. 
 But did you ever know the leader of such a class 
 or such a movement whose life, if you came to 
 think of it, was not one long act of self-renuncia- 
 tion? If they are full of joy, if they are full of 
 power, it is because they have first denied their 
 very selves. Therefore they are set free into the 
 liberty of glory and joy of Christ. But this is 
 not easy, and those deceive you who would 
 persuade you that it is. 
 
 “The good that I would I do not, and the 
 evil that I would not, that I do.’’ These struggles 
 go with us to the end, and for you to demand 
 that it should be easy is vain. Do not shrink 
 away from the fact that life hurts. ‘‘Not on 
 plumes nor canopied in down the soul wins fame.”’ 
 But if you accept that truth, there is no reason 
 why any preacher in the world should hesitate 
 to point out to you that what Jesus Christ achieved 
 he calls us to achieve also. 
 
 Those moralists, J am persuaded, are mistaken 
 who say to us, ‘‘ You, of course, are not expected 
 
88 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 to be a great saint, nor to achieve any extra- 
 ordinary thing.” Why should you not be a 
 great saint? Why not? The power is there, 
 the power of God, and it is contemptible to 
 decide beforehand that for you some half measure, 
 some half life, some half sacrifice is enough, No— 
 ‘fall of you are children of the most High,” and 
 therefore to all it is possible to tread that path 
 of self-renunciation which is the price of glory 
 and joy and life. 
 
TEMPERAMENT 
 
 HE triumph of human beings over nature 
 has become such a common-place that it is 
 almost impossible for us now to be surprised at 
 anything that science can promise or perform. 
 Many of us were more excited when we heard 
 that M. Bleriot had flown over the Channel than 
 we were when someone flew over the Atlantic 
 Ocean, because science now advances with such 
 strides and with such triumphant assurance of 
 its power that we are bankrupt of astonishment. 
 I was reminded when I was in America that 
 Abraham Lincoln could not travel faster than 
 the first Abraham that we ever heard of—unless 
 a horse does go faster than a camel? To-day 
 you can speak on one side of the Atlantic and 
 have your voice carried across in a few seconds of 
 time. News can be sent in that little space of 
 time, which a hundred years ago took four or 
 five months to cross the United States. This 
 has become so commonplace to us that we hardly 
 feel surprised. 
 
 Science has taught us such an extraordinary 
 mastery over the material world that we expect 
 to triumph, and we forget that the whole of that 
 
 89 
 
go LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 mastery is due to obedience, based on the con- 
 viction of the ordinary man that he cannot escape 
 scientific law. All great scientists have always 
 known that. Before they were able to convince 
 the ordinary person, they were wise if they kept 
 their knowledge to themselves, or they would 
 very likely be burnt or stoned as magicians! But 
 when the ordinary person grasped the universal 
 character of scientific law, there was at first a 
 sense of profound depression. If you read the 
 poets and the prose-writers, and the preachers, 
 and even, sometimes, the scientists also, of the 
 middle of the nineteenth century—men like 
 Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, and even Huxley 
 —you will be struck by the sense of despondency 
 with which these men realised that we cannot 
 escape scientific law. ‘The effect upon them was 
 of paralysis. They felt that kind of fatalism, 
 that dreary inability to alter things, or to mould 
 their lives, or to have any freedom, which came 
 of a “‘mechanical’”’ view of the universe. We 
 ourselves, it seemed, were only parts of a great 
 machine, and there came over the spirit of think- 
 ing men and women a sense of helplessness and 
 despondency. Huxley, in his ironical fashion, 
 draws a mocking contrast between that early 
 astronomy which taught that the stars were kept 
 in their courses by celestial hands, and our present 
 belief that they are kept there by the laws of 
 gravitation. The impression one gets is that, 
 
TEMPERAMENT OL 
 
 for him, as for the theologians and the poets and 
 the dreamers, something of beauty and glory 
 had passed away from the earth. One gets it 
 still more strongly in the poetry of Matthew 
 Arnold or Tennyson. Yet how strange it seems 
 to us now that it should have been so! Because 
 in fact, the discovery of scientific law—not merely 
 by the genius and scientist but by the ordinary 
 man and woman in the street—has resulted in 
 setting us free, in giving us a power over that 
 universe which is governed by law, which would 
 have seetned to our forefathers simply miraculous. 
 
 We can see millions of miles; we can hear across 
 the world; we can throw our voice around the 
 world; we can rise into the air; we can plunge 
 beneath the sea; we can alter climates; we can 
 change the face of the world. All this has become 
 possible precisely because we know that the world 
 is governed by unbreakable law. Knowledge, 
 instead of making us slaves, has set us free. 
 
 “‘The powers that be are ordained of God.” 
 St. Paul, I suppose, was not thinking of scientific 
 laws, and with much of what he says in this 
 passage some of us would be tempted to disagree. 
 But in the sense that we think of ‘‘law”’ to-night, 
 how inspired it is! 
 
 “‘ Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. 
 For there is no power but of God: the powers that be 
 are ordained of God. 
 
92 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 “Whosoever therefore, resisteth the power, resisteth 
 the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall 
 receive to themselves damnation.”’ 
 
 Is not that scientific law? You must obey 
 the great power which is expressed in what we 
 call scientific law, and if you do not obey it, you 
 break yourself. If you do obey, you gain almost un- 
 believable power over the world in which you live. 
 
 Later, and still very slowly, we have begun to 
 realise that law is present not only in the ‘‘na- 
 tural’’ universe, the material universe with which 
 we are surrounded, but in human affairs also. 
 The idea of law as an arbitrary thing which men 
 could enact or suspend or repeal as they chose, 
 is being gradually superseded by a scientific 
 understanding of the fact that whatever you may 
 do, there are certain laws in human affairs which 
 cannot be broken: laws which to obey gives power, 
 and to seek to disobey brings, as St. Paul puts 
 it, ‘‘damnation.”’ 
 
 We all to-day talk glibly enough about economic 
 law. We have begun to realise that the old way 
 in which Parliaments used to pass laws about 
 prices and about wages was unsound, because 
 they ignored fundamental laws; and if there are 
 fundamental laws, it is as senseless for Parliament 
 to sit there wasting time passing what it calls 
 laws, violating these fundamental principles, 
 as it would be for them to sit and pass laws against 
 
TEMPERAMENT 93 
 
 the law of gravitation. Consequently, there has 
 come to many, first of all, that sense of impotence 
 and despair, that despondency which came to 
 people when they first understood scientific law. 
 
 We say sometimes, rather mournfully, that 
 it is no use legislating or trying to change things 
 very much: “‘you cannot fight against economic 
 law.” The idea, as I said before, that there are 
 fundamental principles which it is not in our 
 power to change or escape has at last moved from 
 our conception of the material world to our con- 
 ception of our own human affairs. It has been 
 followed, as before, with the sense of despondency, 
 the fear that we cannot do very much because 
 there are against us certain forces which we cannot 
 escape. Why should there be despondency? 
 Mr. Chesterton rightly says that if you jump 
 over a precipice you do not break the law of 
 gravitation. We could add, could we not, that 
 if you fly in the air you do not break the law of 
 gravitation. We can fly to-day because scientists 
 and engineers have understood the laws which 
 govern flight, and instead of trying to work against 
 them the aviator is obeying them all the time, and 
 because he obeys them he seems able to violate 
 them. But there is no one person here who 
 dreams that you really violate the law of gravita- 
 tion when you fly in the air. The same argument 
 applies to economics, but it has not yet been quite 
 freely applied, because there are people to whom 
 
94 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 it is easier to resign themselves to things as they 
 are than to make the necessary effort to find out 
 along what lines and in what way we can get the 
 power to change them. 
 
 Most of us are in the same case with regard to 
 that wonderful new science which I believe is 
 going to mark an epoch—no, not to mark, but 
 to make an epoch—in the advance of humanity. 
 We have witnessed, in our generation, what is 
 practically the birth of a new science. It is still 
 very new. I believe it to be sometimes worship- 
 ping false gods, and very often speaking a ridicu- 
 lous language. But, I believe, as many of you 
 do also, that the modern idea of psychology is 
 practically a new science, that it deserves the 
 name of science, precisely because it has grasped 
 the fact that our minds also are governed by 
 universal law. As I said, the lonely genius 
 cannot really help us much, until we believe him. 
 Saints and psychologists have always known 
 these laws concerning human nature; but it is 
 only in the twentieth century that ordinary 
 people have grasped the implication, the meaning 
 and the importance of the discovery that our 
 minds, our temperaments, our characters, are 
 also governed by law. It is that conviction, 
 which modern psychologists have brought home 
 to quite ordinary people, that I believe will be 
 the starting-place of a new and great development 
 of power and freedom in the human race. 
 
TEMPERAMENT 95 
 
 “Now is our salvation nearer than when we 
 believed.” Thus says St. Paul. These words 
 seem to me more true, more wonderful to-day, 
 than perhaps at any other time since he wrote 
 them. 
 
 Knowing the time, that it is high time to awake 
 out of sleep; for now is our salvation nearer than 
 when we believed. 
 
 The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us 
 therefore cast off the works of darkness and let us 
 put on the armour of light. 
 
 It is light that enables us to direct our own 
 powers, as it was light that gave us power over 
 the world in which we live. It is light that 
 modern psychology is bringing us to-day, the 
 light which will enable us to conquer ourselves. 
 
 Now, of course, in a sense, people have always 
 conquered themselves, thank God. There has 
 been a certain instinctive knowledge and also a 
 highly trained and experienced knowledge among 
 spiritual advisers, of the way in which people 
 may direct themselves. But it is a tremendous 
 advance when we ourselves begin to understand 
 how the thing is done. 
 
 We do not know to-day from what early form 
 our great possession of wheat has come. We 
 know that it must have been developed through 
 ages and ages from some much less valuable and 
 
96 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 useful form. To know the exact way in which 
 it was done would not make it any less wonderful, 
 any less of a miracle. It is a cheap and foolish 
 mind which to-day should think that because we 
 are beginning to understand something of the 
 processes by which a man may conquer himself, 
 that process is less wonderful, less miraculous, 
 less glorious. On the contrary, as Professor 
 Thomson taught us, our wonder should increase; 
 but with that wonder should come something of 
 the determination to conquer, something of the 
 assurance of ultimate conquest which has been 
 the glory of the scientists of the nineteenth and 
 twentieth centuries. 
 
 So, to-day, we are faced, all of us, with the 
 necessity of ordering our own lives and con- 
 quering our own temperaments. And we have, 
 moreover, the assurance of the power to do so 
 which was lacking to previous generations. Yet, 
 here again, there arises first of all in the minds of 
 many of us the sense of despondency. Because 
 the psychologists will tell you exactly what your 
 difficulties are, and why they come to be there, 
 and how effect always follows cause, the first 
 impression of many of those who read the subject 
 is one of impotence. There is, of course, a certain 
 school of teachers who give you the feeling that 
 because you have a certain heredity, because 
 certain things happened to your parents, because 
 certain things happened to you when you were a 
 
TEMPERAMENT 97 
 
 child, ill effects inevitably follow, and you are 
 helpless in the power of these laws of psychology. 
 
 The law of cause and effect has produced in you 
 that weakness, that despondency, that irregular- 
 ity, that dislocation of mind, and because you 
 recognise it to be the effect of a cause and the 
 cause has escaped your control—since it originated 
 in your past life, or perhaps in your parents’ lives— 
 therefore there comes to you something of that 
 feeling of despondency which came with the first 
 discovery of natural law. 
 
 If our own minds are governed by law, if, 
 because something terrible happened to you when 
 you were a child, you now suffer your present 
 trouble, what is the use of striving against it? 
 You cannot remove it because its cause lies in the 
 past. It is out of your control. It never was in 
 your centrol. Or again, if there is in your present 
 circumstances something that you cannot escape— 
 you are doing the wrong work, or doing it under 
 the wrong conditions, or some side of your nature 
 is unfulfilled, your sex-instincts or your true 
 vocation, and it is not possible—let us say—to 
 alter these things, then you must suffer. If 
 some power that is in you has to be suppressed 
 it sets up in you a ferment and a revolt. Or 
 again, if some check has been imposed on you in 
 the past, it has set up in you a nervousness, an 
 irritability, a weakness, a fear—anything you 
 like that is troublesome and difficult—and the 
 
98 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 very fact that you know how it has happened 
 only makes you feel helpless. Yet the result of 
 knowledge should always be power, and always 
 has been power when knowledge has become 
 understanding. 
 
 To know that the world is governed by laws 
 that you cannot escape, to him who knows it 
 may be paralysis, but to him who wnderstands 
 it is freedom and power. So I am persuaded 
 that those psychologists are most right and most 
 prophetic who find in the knowledge they are able 
 to give us not paralysis but power. To know 
 that something has happened to you which has 
 upset your nervous balance may, in the first 
 instance, be paralysing; but when you understand 
 all, it will mean power, for you are now working 
 in the light. You can see what has happened 
 to you. You can understand it. You°can, if 
 you will, take the same, or nearly the same, 
 detached view of your own character and your 
 own temperament as you could of someone else’s. 
 That is science indeed. 
 
 That is why I believe that there will come to 
 this generation a power to change human nature, 
 or if not-to change it—for that, I think, a little 
 begs the question—to redirect its energies, to use 
 them in the right way, to use them creatively 
 instead of wastefully, which will make the twen- 
 tieth century one of the greatest pages in human 
 history. 
 
TEMPERAMENT 99 
 
 But many of us neither believe in our power 
 nor welcome it. Is it unfair to say that the 
 rich man sometimes welcomes the fact that 
 “‘economic law’’ justifies him in accepting as 
 inevitable unemployment or poverty? Is it un- 
 fair to say that we are sometimes ready to wel- 
 come the assumption that psychological knowledge 
 justifies us in resignation to our temperaments? 
 It is so much easier, is it not, to be resigned than 
 to fight? There has arisen a kind of ‘‘Man- 
 chester School” of psychologists, like the Man- 
 chester School of economists who said there were 
 certain economic laws which we must allow to 
 work themselves out without interference, and 
 then everything would come right. So I some- 
 times think that there is a kind of Manchester 
 School of psychologists who say there are certain 
 laws which will work themselves out, and we 
 can and need do nothing. Can we not? Need 
 we not? I think we both need and can. It is 
 not merely by knowing scientific law that you 
 overcome the world: it is by applying it. Now, 
 therefore, let us apply the knowledge that psy- 
 chology has given us. 
 
 Do you not often find yourself saying, when 
 people complain of something you have done or 
 been or said, ‘‘Well, you see, I am like that!’’ 
 Somebody makes every breakfast in his house 
 —I say advisedly ‘‘his house,’’ though it is 
 certainly sometimes ‘“‘her house’’—a nightmare, 
 
100 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 by coming down with a face of sulky rage, 
 and looking out for everything that can annoy 
 him; and if you complain, he will say, with com- 
 placency, ‘‘I am never at my best in the early 
 morning.’’ He will see to it that no one else 
 within the radius of his influence is at his or her best 
 either! Why should the cloud of his preposterous 
 depression blacken everyone else’s . morning? 
 Because he is ‘‘like that.’’ It is true: he is like 
 that. But need he be like that? 
 
 There are people who are given to violent 
 explosions of temper, and when the shattered 
 victims of their rage protest, they say compla- 
 cently, “‘Oh, I am like that, you know! But it 
 doesn’t last. It is all over in a second.’ Their 
 household is a stricken field. For them it is all 
 over in a second, and they are genuinely surprised 
 and even hurt at the fact that it is not quite over 
 with the rest of the household. 
 
 There are people who take the opposite line. 
 With them it is not over in a second. Quite the 
 contrary. ‘They cannot ever forget some trifling 
 error, some unintended slight, some unconscious 
 mood. They cannot forget it because they are ‘‘so 
 sensitive.’’ They are ‘‘like that’’—so sensitive 
 that a word may blacken the whole day for them. 
 But ought it to blacken the whole day for them? 
 Ought you to be so insanely sensitive that you 
 must sulk a day or a week if someone hurts you? 
 Do you realise—I am sometimes tempted to 
 
TEMPERAMENT IOI 
 
 wonder if any of us realise—the devastating effect 
 on others of what we are pleased to call our 
 ‘‘moods’’? 
 
 To be moody is the temperament of many 
 people, but when the mood has passed for them, 
 its shadow has fallen so deep upon their friends 
 and relations that it cannot quickly pass. Then 
 the moody one experiences surprise and regret 
 that others should be so sulky and so unrea- 
 sonable! Few of us realise how hard it is 
 to have the sunshine blackened by our depres- 
 sion, by our mood, which we could conquer if we 
 would. 
 
 What a lesson in the art of victory is contained 
 in the passage I read just now from Mr. Cherry 
 Garrard’s book! 
 
 ‘““Temperamentally he (Scott) was a weak man 
 and very easily might have been an irritable 
 autocrat.”” Because he would not be an irritable 
 autocrat, the very fact of his moods and his 
 difficulties gave him, I am certain, a power over 
 fate, over circumstances, over other men, which 
 began with the assertion of this power over him- 
 self. Those of you who are naturally ‘‘tempera- 
 mental’? (to use a much abused word), who are 
 moody and unequal in spirit, who are irritable 
 and hate yourselves for it, should find in such a 
 story as this of Scott’s, a magnificent inspiration; 
 for the impression that one gets from it is that it 
 was by the very fact of his fighting with his 
 
102 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 difficulties that he achieved such power. Men 
 came to love him and to follow him because he 
 had gone through that, and with such magnificent 
 determination had conquered it. ‘‘Naturally so 
 weak, naturally so peevish, highly strung, irritable 
 depressed, moody’’—that is the man who goes to 
 the South Pole, where conditions impose a nervous 
 strain so great that, as Mr. Cherry Garrard says 
 _ elsewhere, it was impossible for the best friends 
 to speak to one another for days at a time, because 
 they were so afraid of saying something out- 
 rageous. The nervous strain on all was terrific 
 and this man who, by nature, was peevish, highly 
 strung, irritable, depressed, moody, was recog- 
 nised by all those others as their natural leader 
 and their king. In a company of men which 
 contained a man like Dr. Wilson, a man like 
 Captain Bowers, whose natural temperaments 
 were serene, calm, tactful, cheerful, indomitable— 
 even in a company where two such men were to 
 be found, Scott was recognised as the strongest of 
 them all. ‘‘We never knew how strong he was,” 
 writes Mr. Garrard, ‘‘till we saw him there, lying 
 dead.’ The last to die, the one who held out 
 longest. It is perhaps only when one realises 
 what men like Wilson and Bowers were that one 
 realises what a king Scott must have been, to be 
 as Mr. Garrard says, ‘‘the most dominant char- 
 acter of our community.’’ I am persuaded that 
 it was precisety because he had to conquer these 
 
TEMPERAMENT 103 
 
 apparently humiliating defects of moodiness and 
 irritability and nervous strain and despondency, 
 and that at the last, even, he had them writhing 
 under his heel but not killed, that he so dominated 
 that little community. This man would not 
 admit that because a thing was his temperament, 
 it was therefore to be his fate. ‘‘Your tempera- 
 ment is not your fate,” it has been said. ‘‘Tem- 
 perament decides our trials; it does not decide 
 our destiny.” 
 
 You perhaps find it hard to work with others; 
 you are one of those capable and efficient people 
 who say, ‘‘I would rather do a thing myself than 
 trouble other people with it.”” Yes, but that does 
 not help the other people to do all that they 
 might, does it? You had to be taught once. 
 Someone had to be patient with you, and to be 
 unable to be patient with others is not something 
 that is an inalienable part of your temperament. 
 It is something that you have to conquer. 
 
 Or you find it terribly difficult not to be irritable. 
 I feel sure that in twentieth century life there is 
 a very much greater nervous strain on all of us 
 than has been the case in the past. Many of us, 
 therefore, are nervous and irritable and highly 
 strung. What then? Then we are called upon 
 to have the greater power over ourselves; to 
 understand our dangers and our difficulties, to 
 trace them to their source, to deal with them 
 wisely, but always with the assurance of triumph, 
 
104 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 which is the great gift of science to twentieth 
 century people. ‘‘I am like that.” Yes, you 
 are like that. What are you going to do about it? 
 That is the question that modern psychology is 
 putting to you and to me, and it puts it with that 
 kind of assurance that there is something that 
 you can do about it which will make all the dif- 
 ference between working in the dark and in the 
 light. 
 
 Knowledge means power, and knowledge is 
 given to us in full measure. Let us work while 
 it is day. While the light comes to us, let us go 
 forward. It may be that to this generation there 
 has come one of those great and dramatic moments 
 when all Humanity makes a forward stride, be- 
 cause for the first time not the saint only, or the 
 scholar or the genius, but you and I are dealing 
 with our own temperaments no longer in the dark 
 but in the light. 
 
LONELY PEOPLE 
 
 HAT ancient Latin saying that I read just 
 now is painfully true, is it not? ‘‘A great 
 city, a great solitude.’”’ I do not think there are 
 lonelier places in the world than great cities, if one 
 has no friends. ‘‘For little do men perceive what 
 solitude is, nor how far it extendeth; for a crowd 
 is not company, and faces are but a gallery of 
 pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where 
 there is no love.’”” People may come up to London 
 from their homes, and find here six or seven 
 millions of people, and no friends. To those 
 people we should all of us try to extend our friend- 
 ship. All of us should remember what a lonely 
 place London is, and be on the look-out for people 
 who come up here, whether young or old, and find 
 themselves without any friends. One of the chief 
 purposes of our Guildhouse ought to be, I think, 
 that it should help people to make friends with 
 one another. 
 
 It is unnatural not to have friends. Another 
 great writer has said that man is “‘naturally a 
 political animal.” (He did not mean in the 
 sense that an Englishman is a political animal. 
 
 105 
 
106 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 I think Englishmen are political animals, and 
 Englishwomen too.) He meant in the sense 
 that they naturally live together. The word 
 ‘‘political’’ meant, to him, belonging to a com- 
 munity, and it is natural for men to live in cities 
 or communities; unnatural, as he says, ‘‘either 
 god-like or beast-like’” to want to live alone. 
 That is true, is it not? in the sense that it is un- 
 natural to be solitary, and one can see by the 
 effect that it has on people how bad it is for them: 
 how people who have for long been lonely get a 
 kind of stiffness in their spiritual joints. They 
 cannot easily let themselves go; they cannot easily 
 give themselves away, even when they want to. 
 They cannot express their desire for love; they 
 cannot express their own love when they feel it. 
 They find it difficult to form the habit of being 
 at ease and natural with other human beings. 
 Those who want to make friends with lonely 
 people should realise that. I would urge them 
 very strongly to remember that it is very un- 
 natural not always to have had friends. Nature 
 plants us in the middle of a family. Weare born 
 into families in order that we may have human 
 society round us, a permanent. society, a stable 
 home, brothers and sisters as well as parents. All 
 these things are ‘‘wealth’” to human nature, 
 because they make us truly human. Therefore 
 do not be discouraged if you find a person who 
 has long been lonely, difficult to make friends 
 
LONELY PEOPLE 107 
 
 with. Do not be impatient; do not think you 
 can easily break down the walls of their reserve. 
 They have built round themselves—unwillingly— 
 a kind of wall, in order that they may hide their 
 solitude behind it, and you cannot easily break 
 it down. You must not even try hurriedly to 
 break down the reserve of any human spirit. 
 Because people have been lonely in the past, it 
 almost inevitably follows that they will find it 
 difficult now to form the habit of making friends. 
 Consider that that lonely soul may have, as I 
 shall show a little later on, some gift that humanity 
 is the poorer for lacking; but that he or she cannot 
 easily give it, because to give it is to give himself 
 away, and the lonely person has made almost a 
 virtue of never giving himself away for fear what 
 he gives may be scorned. It is one of the saddest 
 things about loneliness that it makes a natural 
 demeanour and buoyancy impossible—literally 
 _ impossible. The sensitive spirit inevitably cramps 
 itself or is cramped by that unnatural loneliness, 
 and always, in making friends with the lonely, 
 remember that it takes reverence and respect and 
 a very real love for human nature to enable us 
 to ‘‘make friends” with anyone. 
 
 People sometimes, I think, offer their friendship 
 in the insufferable way in which others offer 
 charity! You know there was once a man with 
 whom no girl would dance because he said he 
 always made a point of dancing with wallflowers! 
 
108 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 Consequently he could find in the end no one to 
 dance with at all. There are some people who 
 go about in an almost professional way trying to 
 be kind to the lonely, in such a way that the 
 lonely would rather perish than accept their 
 kindness. We need that kind of reverence for 
 the human spirit which makes one gentle and 
 willing to wait, and involves always a respect for 
 the personality of others quite as great as we 
 expect other people to give to ours. 
 
 I speak for a moment, first of all, about lonely 
 people, but I want chiefly to speak to-night to 
 lonely people. The worst punishment that hu- 
 manity now tolerates for the criminal is solitary 
 confinement, a punishment so dread and so in- 
 human that it breaks the spirit and sometimes 
 unhinges the reason of the person who is sub- 
 jected to it. Since the militant suffragists and 
 conscientious objectors have been in prison, they— 
 being.more articulate, more able to express them- 
 selves than ordinary convicts—have been able to 
 tell us a little of what prison life means. Those 
 of you who have read, and I hope most of you 
 have, such a book as ‘‘English Prisons To-day,” 
 by Mr. Stephen Hobhouse and Mr. A. Fenner 
 Brockway, will remember that terrible descrip- 
 tion of the effect of this apparently comparatively 
 harmless punishment of solitary confinement. 
 There is no physical torture, and yet solitude is 
 so profoundly unnatural to the human spirit that 
 
LONELY PEOPLE 109 
 
 those who have gone through it, or who know 
 people who have gone through it, say that it is 
 impossible to describe its terrors. And there are 
 people, not within prison walls, who seem to walk 
 about the earth under a perpetual sentence of 
 solitary confinement; people whose spirits are so 
 lonely that they seem as though they cannot make 
 friends. 
 
 Either they cannot make friends or they cannot 
 keep them. I do not know which is worse, but 
 either is very bitter to the human spirit. To what 
 is it due? It is due sometimes, I know, to cir- 
 cumstances, to some solitary position in life, 
 some difficulty in one’s surroundings. But far 
 oftener it is due to something in the spirit of the 
 person himself, some attitude towards life which 
 imposes upon him this terrible sentence of solitary 
 confinement. It is not the lack of fine qualities— 
 quite the contrary; some of these lonely spirits 
 have qualities so fine, abilities so rare, that it is 
 inexplicable to the onlooker that they should be 
 lonely. Yet they are so. Their chief sorrow in 
 life is their loneliness, their inability to make 
 really close and satisfying friendships. And these 
 people, I repeat, are often people of great gifts, 
 not only of intellectual gifts but of moral gifts, 
 people of courage, people of character, people 
 who carry weight where they go, who have in- 
 tellectual powers and strong character, people 
 who can do things and who are of value in the 
 
110 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 world, from whom you cannot if you would 
 withhold your admiration. Yet there is over 
 their lives this terrible shadow: they cannot make 
 friends, or if they make friends they lose them. 
 Yet they desire friends. For such persons as I 
 have described, being fine people and gifted people, 
 desire friends with a hunger which makes their 
 solitude heartrending. It is a source of so much 
 unhappiness that one cannot help asking oneself 
 what is the cause. It is true that London is a 
 lonely place. It is true that if you come up to 
 London without friends, it may be terribly dif- 
 ficult to make any. And yet there are people 
 who will make friends anywhere. 
 
 You all know about Francois de Bonnivard, 
 the Prisoner of Chillon; you probably learned 
 about him when you were at school. He made 
 friends with a spider! He was imprisoned for 
 life, and he made friends with a spider that came 
 up the wall of the cell. Other life-prisoners have 
 made friends with rats or mice. I think of such 
 people as having such a genius for friendship 
 that they cannot help making friends. Put a 
 man like that alone in a cell, cut him off from all 
 human intercourse, and he will make friends with 
 a rat! Well, put such a man in London, and 
 however lonely London may be he will make 
 friends. There are*people whom you may put 
 into any kind of surroundings and they will make 
 friends. I have in mind a friend of mine whose 
 
LONELY PEOPLE III 
 
 circumstances have all been against her in the 
 way of making friendships. I think that most 
 people living her life would have lived a lonely 
 life. She has never perhaps been able to choose 
 her friends, and yet she has many friends, because 
 she has a genius for friendships. It was only 
 when she herself once said to me that she envied 
 my going to college when I was a girl, because, 
 as she said, ‘‘at college you have such opportunities 
 of making friends,” that I realised this. I said, 
 ‘Well, you have no reason to complain on that 
 score, you have so many friends.’”’ She said, 
 ‘Yes, it is true, but I made the friends that were 
 there. I do not think I ever had a chance of 
 choosing my friends.” 
 
 Is not that really the heart of the trouble? 
 We should make friends with the friends who 
 are there. So often lonely people will tell you 
 in the end that they do not care to make friends 
 with such and such another person who is also 
 lonely and wants friends: that is not the kind of 
 friend they want: they have in their mind some 
 high ideal of the sort of person that they want for 
 afriend. Is that really a high ideal of friendship, 
 or is it a high ideal of your own deserts? I speak 
 with feeling, because I remember myself desiring 
 friends intensely and being absolutely unable to 
 make friends. I marvelled at myself, and could 
 not understand it, and thought to myself, with 
 ineffable complacency, that it was because I had 
 
I12 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 such a high ideal of friendship that nobody that 
 I had met yet had ever come up to it. I see now 
 that my “‘high ideal’”’ was simply a form of con- 
 ceit. I thought that that was the only kind of 
 friendship that was good enough for me. I did 
 not realise that making friends is a habit, and 
 that you must practise it wherever you get the 
 chance! 
 
 Making friends is a habit. It is the habit of 
 giving yourself away, and the idea that you 
 must not give yourself away is the real root of 
 essential loneliness. Leaving out for a moment 
 those people (and indeed I do not think there are 
 many) whose circumstances make it impossible 
 for them to make friends, I say of the average 
 lonely person that ninety-nine times out of a 
 hundred their loneliness comes from a deep refusal 
 to give themselves away. ‘They call it reserve or 
 self-respect, and say they will not cast their pearls 
 before swine; but, indeed—I speak to those 
 lonely people who know perhaps at this hour 
 what I have known in the past, the unspeakable 
 bitterness of solitude—it is really that you have 
 not made the habit or recognised the necessity 
 of giving yourself away. 
 
 There are in the world what William James 
 called ‘‘sky-blue souls,’ people who make friends 
 as easily as they breathe, people whose souls are 
 of that celestial hue that there is no shadow in 
 them at all—‘‘no flapping of unclean wings about 
 
LONELY PEOPLE 113 
 
 their cells’’; people to whom the love of their 
 kind is so natural, so easy, that it goes out to 
 everyone. To such happy souls all that I shall 
 say to-night must seem curiously morbid and 
 unnatural and laboured. But it is not the fault 
 of us others that we are naturally introspective 
 and self-centred and morbid. To be so may 
 become a fault, but in the first instance it is per- 
 haps an inheritance, something that we did not 
 choose to have. If we could have chosen, we 
 should have been one of those sky-blue souls who 
 easily make friends! But we are not, and to be 
 as we are is not a sin, in the sense that we are 
 responsible for it. No one is responsible. It 
 is not reasonable even to blame our ancestors; 
 they may blame their ancestors in turn! But 
 there it is, that temperament, naturally self- 
 centred, naturally self-conscious, naturally in- 
 troverted, introspective. To say to such people, 
 ‘Just forget yourselves’”’ is to add bitterness to 
 their sufferings. It is precisely there that they 
 find the difficulty! And yet if one could make a 
 habit of giving, if one could realise, as a constant 
 state of mind, that in friendship you have to give 
 something that is more than your help, your 
 service, your time; it is yourself that you have to 
 give, it is possible in time to overcome that self- 
 centred, introspective view which makes it seem 
 a kind of outrage to give ourselves away to anyone. 
 
 Make friends with those who are there for you 
 
114 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 to make friends with. Do not be searching the 
 horizon for an ideal friend. Are you an ideal 
 person that you should have an ideal friend? 
 What would you do with an ideal friend if you 
 had one? Disappoint him all the time! Make 
 friends with the people who are there to make 
 friends with. They will be better than spiders 
 after all, or, at least, if there are some animal- 
 lovers here who would prefer a spider—and I am 
 sure there are many who will prefer a dog—still, 
 believe me, they are wrong. The human being 
 with whom you may make friends has much 
 more to give you, infinitely more than you suspect, 
 and perhaps much more than you deserve. But 
 you ask yourself, do you not? when you try to 
 make friends, whether such a person is worth 
 making a friend of, worth the sacrifice of your 
 reserve, and whether you perhaps are worthy to 
 be their friend? It is all so self-conscious, so 
 laboured, so artificial. Yes, I know, but it is 
 the beginning of a habit which will afterwards 
 become like second nature. ‘‘For use almost 
 can change the stamp of nature.’”’ It is possible 
 to learn by practice the habit of friendship; but 
 it must be practised on the people who are there; 
 you must not go round the world looking for 
 someone; there are the people around you now; 
 those are the people for you to make friends with. 
 It is again and again against a blank refusal to 
 make friends with the people who are there that 
 
LONELY PEOPLE 115 
 
 I find all my attempts to help the lonely, as far 
 as I am concerned, have broken down. People 
 would like to make friends with some great person, 
 some very good person; to them they feel that 
 they can give themselves. They think perhaps, 
 though they do not say, that such an exchange 
 will be a fair one! But say to them, ‘‘Well, I 
 am so glad to have met you who are lonely, be- 
 cause Mr. Jones over the way is very lonely,” and 
 you find at once that Mr. Jones is not the person 
 they want to make friends with. Is it not then, 
 their fault if they are lonely? 
 
 With all the difficulties in the world before 
 you, of circumstances and environment, the 
 fundamental difficulty lies, not in London, not 
 in the size or greatness of it, not in your poverty 
 or difficulties, but in yourself, because you have 
 never formed the habit of giving anything of 
 yourself at all to people, until you have weighed 
 them in the balance and felt quite sure that they 
 were worthy of so great a gift. All the world is 
 filled with human beings who are your potential 
 friends, and all the time that you live without 
 friends you are making more and more difficult 
 for yourself the habit of friendship. When you 
 make a friend at last, the same kind of tempera- 
 ment is easily very jealous and very exclusive, 
 and being so, it kills the friendship made. For 
 love will not tolerate that kind of possessiveness. 
 Love is of all things the one that must be most 
 
116 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 free to give itself where it will. Because a person 
 has become your friend, is that a reason why he 
 should have no other friend? Are you enough to 
 fill a person’s heart? He is enough, you say; 
 such-and-such a person is enough for me: why 
 cannot I be enough for him? He is enough for 
 you, she is enough for you, because your little 
 heart is so narrow, because you have cramped 
 your mind and restricted your interests in your 
 solitude until you cannot take in more than one 
 person. Do you desire that to be true of your 
 friend also? Could you wish that you should be 
 enough for your friend, that he or she should have 
 no other friend, no other interests, at least none 
 comparable to yourself? Do you not see how 
 you create your own loneliness? You desire to 
 impose upon your friends the narrow limitations 
 that govern your own heart. You cannot bear 
 to see them as fond of anyone else as they are of 
 you, giving them more time, seeming perhaps to 
 give them more interest. You should rejoice 
 that they have escaped from those narrow prison 
 bars behind which you walk. Is that too hard? 
 But, reflect: narrowness kills love, because it is 
 love’s opposite. It destroys the very heart of 
 love, and so that loneliness which for an hour or 
 a year you thought was gone for ever, because 
 you had found a friend, returns, because either 
 your friend is weary of your perpetual demands 
 that you should be enough for him who is enough 
 
LONELY PEOPLE 117 
 
 for you, or the friendship is endured rather as an 
 act of duty and conscience than with that joyful 
 love that you desire. Is a love shared with other 
 people not enough for you? Well, if it is not 
 enough, it is not because you love your friend 
 so much, it is because of your hungry, avid 
 egotism. If you even desire to swallow up that 
 person’s affection in your own, is it not true that 
 your loneliness is your fault? 
 
 If you look at the world to-day (and forget 
 yourself for a moment) what will you say the 
 world is dying for? Love! The world perishes 
 with hate, it dies for lack of love, it is sick and 
 poisoned with hate, and what it needs is the kind 
 of love that God gives, divine love, unexacting 
 love, giving all. You say that you are lonely 
 and have no one to love, and in the same breath 
 you must admit that the world perishes for lack 
 of precisely that—love. Do you not see what a 
 contradiction it is? You and I have complained 
 that we have no one who really desires our friend- 
 ship and our love. We felt that our love was 
 worth so much, that our friendship would have 
 been such a gift. Yes, and in a sense we are 
 right. The real love of any human being is a 
 great gift. But in this world that starves for 
 love, will you say that you can find no one to 
 whom to give any love, no one who needs it? 
 Why, all the world is dying for lack of it! And 
 yet there are people, hundreds, thousands, perhaps 
 
118 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 millions who are lonely, because they will not love 
 the people all around them who are also craving 
 for love. They look for someone else who is more 
 worthy. 
 
 If God were looking for some love that would 
 be worthy of him he would never be loved at all, 
 would he? He takes any kind of love, and I 
 believe he rejoices in it. I think one of the most 
 striking things I ever read about the love of God 
 was in an unpublished essay about the joy that a 
 mother feels when she knows that her child has 
 learnt to recognise her. The writer, who was 
 herself a mother, said, ‘‘I remember when my 
 first child first knew me. He only knew that I 
 was to him a source of food, but I shall never 
 forget the rapture with which I realised that he 
 did know that.’’ And she went on, ‘‘I think 
 that our love of God is often no more understand- 
 ing than that baby’s love of its mother. And 
 yet I can imagine the joy that it is to God that 
 we recognise him at all.” 
 
 The kind of love which makes God welcome 
 from us any kind of response, the love which does 
 not wait, any more than this woman’s love for 
 her child waited, for recognition, but goes out 
 first of all, is that for which the world is longing. 
 ‘*Beloved, herein is love, not that we loved God, 
 but that he first loved us.”’ That is the beginning 
 of all friendship. You must not wait for someone 
 to love you. Herein is love, not that your friend 
 
LONELY PEOPLE 119 
 
 loved you first, but that you loved him. You 
 have experience of such kind of love from your 
 parents, from your friends. Nurses often have 
 it for their little charges; teachers often have it 
 for their pupils. Their love is given without 
 waiting for a return, without measuring whether 
 the child is able to give them a return equal to 
 the value of their love. That their love goes out 
 to them—herein islove. That calculating, careful 
 love which considers whether a person is worthy 
 of your friendship, weighs them up, says, Such 
 a one is not good enough for me to love, is not 
 love. Love hates ‘‘the lore of nicely calculated 
 less and more.”’ 
 
 Christ has been called the Great Solitary, and 
 in this sense he was solitary, that no one was 
 worthy of his friendship; that he gave to all his 
 friends something better than they could give to 
 him; a more perfect understanding, a more lovely 
 justice, a more entire constancy. Yet it is true 
 that in another sense he was not solitary at all. 
 For he had friends, a circle of friends, and an 
 inner circle of friends, people for whom he had a 
 personal love as well as all the love that he gave 
 to all the world. He taught us by his attitude 
 towards the outcast, the publican and the sinner, 
 the socially despised, the morally worthless or 
 apparently worthless, the Gentile—he taught us 
 by his attitude to all to feel reverence for everyone 
 who is willing to love. With what respect he 
 
120 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 treated their affection and their loyalty! With 
 what a friendship he lived on terms with his 
 friends! How little, in proportion, have any of us 
 to give! If he did not ask whether these people 
 were worthy of his friendship, how is it possible 
 for us who have so little love to give, to ask it? 
 So little time, so little understanding, so little 
 patience! I sometimes wonder, do not you? that 
 we have any friends at all. I suppose at the end 
 of one’s life the thing that will strike most of us 
 most of all is the much that our friends did for us 
 and the little that we were able to do for them. 
 I cannot believe there can be anyone in the world 
 who has had friends who is not continually struck 
 with the enormous debt that he owesthem. ‘They 
 set you right with life. They enable you to be 
 yourself. Is it not enough? Is it not much? . 
 What more should you ask from them than that 
 most precious and lovely gift—that they enable 
 you to be on terms with life? That, any friend 
 can give you, and then, beyond that, your friend 
 also, perhaps, is on terms with life because of 
 you, and able to use gifts that you did not suspect 
 were there, and to blossom out into happiness and 
 usefulness; and all those things are happiness to 
 you. 
 
 In a sense it is true that all of us are lonely. 
 Putting aside that loneliness which comes of a 
 stubborn refusal to give oneself it does happen to 
 everyone sometimes to feel lonely. 
 
LONELY PEOPLE 121 
 
 I pass away now from that terrible permanent 
 loneliness of which I have chiefly spoken, and 
 before I stop let me say one word about that kind 
 of loneliness which comes to everyone, because 
 all of us are a little egotistical and therefore, all 
 of us make our friends feel lonely sometimes. All 
 of us. The One who was the best Friend in the 
 world, Christ himself, was made to feel lonely 
 sometimes by lack of understanding and egotism, 
 and what is true of him is true of us, only that we 
 also in our turn make our friends sometimes feel 
 lonely. I do not know whether it is possible for 
 me to convey to you in any language that ex- 
 perience, the unspeakable happiness of feeling 
 that God is your friend. I mean in a personal 
 sense—I mean God as you see him in Jesus Christ. 
 But I think those who do not know it might a 
 little imagine it, if they could realise that we 
 believe there is a personal living relationship with 
 Someone who is always just. The trouble with 
 introspective people is that first of all they think 
 you have not been just to them, and then they 
 think that perhaps they have deceived you. 
 Sometimes I can remember going to see somebody 
 on whom I desired to make a good impression. 
 I did not realise that that was what I desired but 
 I can see now that I did. When I went away 
 from that interview, I used to go over every 
 word I had said and wonder how it had affected 
 them, and was very often miserable about it, 
 
122 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 and reflected that I really had not done myself 
 justice! That kind of attitude is devastating to 
 the spirit, is it not? There is no peace to that 
 kind of mind except to know that you have a 
 Friend—I put it in the simplest language—who 
 is never deceived by you, who is never “‘bluffed”’ 
 by you, who is never mistaken in you, but is 
 always absolutely and perfectly just to you, who 
 do not even know how to be just to yourself. 
 That is a happiness which does not indeed wholly 
 destroy a loneliness which must sometimes come 
 to all of us, but it makes it seem quite a little 
 thing. There are people to whom that hymn, 
 which to some of you must have seemed a strange 
 one, is literally true:— 
 
 Jesu, the very thought of Thee 
 With sweetness fills my breast, 
 
 But sweeter far Thy Face to see, 
 And in Thy Presence rest. 
 
 No voice can sing, no heart can frame, 
 Nor can the memory find 
 
 A sweeter sound than Jesu’s Name, 
 The Saviour of mankind. 
 
 O Hope of every contrite heart, 
 O Joy of all the meek, 
 
 To those who ask how kind Thou art, 
 How good to those who seek! 
 
LONELY PEOPLE 123 
 
 But what to those who find? Ah! this 
 Nor tongue nor pen can show; 
 
 The love of Jesus, what it is 
 None but his loved ones know. 
 
 Well, but we are all his loved ones. I should 
 rather have said ‘‘None but his lovers know.” 
 And this also I say to those whose difficulty is 
 not that they have so few friends but so many, so 
 few interests but so many (I know there are many 
 of you here in this Guildhouse): when you feel 
 that all has been drained out of you, that you 
 have neither time, nor strength, nor perhaps even 
 love to give any more because the world has 
 taken out of you all that you had to give, to be in 
 communion with God, to be in personal com- 
 munion with Jesus Christ, is to be filled again 
 with all that the world needs, with that divine 
 love which your friends desire of you, to become 
 like a conduit pipe through whom the love of 
 God flows, instead of your empty, weary, shrivelled 
 little self. 
 
ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 
 
 A LITTLE while ago I said in the course of 
 
 a sermon that it was a very evil thing to 
 try to set a good example, and I felt at the time 
 that I must not leave it just there; for I feel very 
 strongly that it is an easy little pitfall to fall into, 
 and few of us wholly escape it. It really involves 
 the value of reality, and perhaps one of the easiest 
 ways to fall into a contempt for reality is the 
 habit—so deplorably common among religious 
 people—of trying to set a good example. 
 
 Why is it rather detestable to set a good ex- 
 ample? I believe that, however surprised you 
 may be to hear it put like that, in your hearts 
 you do resent it, when you meet it. If you are 
 conscious that somebody is doing something on 
 purpose to set you a good example, you do not 
 like it, do you? It gives a certain chill to your 
 feelings about that person? I feel very strongly 
 the truth of this in reading the Gospels. For the 
 most part, our Lord’s words and acts are set forth 
 with such extraordinary simplicity, a simplicity 
 that has sometimes prevented people from per- 
 ceiving the wonderful literary beauty of what is 
 
 124 
 
ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 125 
 
 set down. It is simple; but there is in that 
 simplicity an appeal which comes from the fact 
 that our Lord’s words and actions and thoughts 
 were so single-minded, so sincere, that when there 
 is even a suggestion of insincerity, I do not think 
 it is possible to avoid feeling a certain chill. The 
 picture that is given of our Lord in the first 
 three Gospels is so irresistibly attractive that no 
 one who has read them with a detached mind 
 can fail to be attracted by the Person there 
 depicted. But unfortunately it is constantly 
 said to people who are not Christians—thinking 
 and inquiring people—that the Fourth Gospel 
 is the greatest of all the Gospels, and therefore 
 they very often turn first to the Fourth Gospel, 
 and are sometimes not attracted, but repelled. 
 I think the reason is partly this—there are other 
 reasons, but partly it is this—that the fourth 
 Evangelist was so anxious to draw out the under- 
 lying significance of what our Lord taught, and 
 said, that he sometimes seemed to make our Lord 
 acta part. I cannot put it in any other way than 
 that, but here is an instance. When our Lord 
 was standing at the grave of Lazarus, we are 
 told that he prayed. 
 
 Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank 
 thee that thou has heard me. 
 
 And I knew that thou hearest me always; but be- 
 cause of the people which stand by I said it, that 
 they may believe that thou hast sent me. 
 
126 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 Any of you who has ever read that chapter aloud, 
 as many of you must have done, must have been 
 conscious of the sudden shock of that extraordi- 
 nary statement, ‘‘I knew that thou hearest me 
 always; but because of the people which stand by I 
 said 1t.”” 
 
 I do not think there can be a moment’s doubt 
 that the Evangelist himself interpolated or put 
 into our Lord’s mouth these words, because he 
 wanted to bring home to us the extraordinary 
 significance of our Lord’s prayer. There was 
 no desire to deceive. St. John, or whoever was 
 the author of this Gospel, was not writing a 
 historical record, but a theological or philosophical 
 treatise, and he wanted to bring out the signifi- 
 cance of our Lord’s words. We who read it to- 
 day as though it were history and accurately 
 descriptive of what happened, are, whether 
 consciously or insensibly, repelled at the sug- 
 gestion that our Lord actually prayed aloud in 
 order to create a certain effect on the minds of 
 those who stood by. One knows, of course, that 
 it could not have been so. 
 
 Then, again, no Gospel gives so much space to 
 the last evening of our Lord’s life on earth with 
 his friends, the Thursday before Good Friday, 
 when he was sitting with them, sharing his last 
 hours with them, and talking to them with such 
 intimacy and such sacred and beautiful friend- 
 ship. Some of the most lovely and touching, as 
 
ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 127 
 
 well as some of the most glorious sayings are found 
 in those chapters in St. John, which give us our 
 Lord’s discourses to his disciples on that last 
 evening. Then there comes the lovely scene of 
 our Lord girding himself with a towel, and taking 
 water and a basin to wash his disciples’ feet. 
 To wash one’s feet was, in the east, a common 
 usage, a common ceremony, constantly per- 
 formed. During the day people walked the dusty 
 roads of Palestine with bare sandalled feet, and 
 to wash the feet was at once a necessary and 
 ceremonious act. Our Lord did this service for 
 his disciples, and then (the Evangelist goes on 
 to say) he took off the towel that he had girded 
 round him and sat down, and said to them, ‘‘I 
 have done this for you in order to set a good 
 example, for as I have done this to you, so ought 
 you to do it to one another.’”’ I could be almost 
 certain that one of the reasons why that lovely 
 scene has never taken hold of our hearts, or 
 moved us as does the scene depicted in the other 
 three Gospels of the Last Supper which, quite 
 apart from its sacramental or ecclesiastical sig- 
 nificance, so touches one to read about, is partly 
 because of that chilling statement, ‘‘I do this to 
 set you a good example.”’ 
 
 Surely no one who has ever been much waited 
 upon can fail to understand why our Lord did 
 this! He did not do it to set a good example; 
 he did it because he wanted to doit. How many 
 
128 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 hundreds of times must his disciples have washed 
 his feet! How they must have loved to do it, 
 perhaps with a kind of competing between them 
 as to which of them should be allowed the honour 
 of washing the dust from those strong, swift feet, 
 which went everywhere about the hills and roads 
 of Palestine, bringing news of peace, bringing 
 health and life and beauty. It must have been a 
 heavenly thing to do such a service for our Lord. 
 You who have had such services done to you—and 
 which of us has not sometimes, when we are ill or 
 old or tired—do you not know how, sometimes, 
 when the one who has looked after you is tired, 
 it is a delight to say, ‘“Now you sit down, and 
 let me look after you.’’ A wife, perhaps, who 
 has always been waited on by her husband, will 
 say, ‘‘Now you are tired, sit down. I will wait 
 on you.’ Or it may be the other way about. 
 But it is so instinctive, so human, and so dear to 
 do these little material services for people. I am 
 certain our Lord must have been moved by some 
 such impulse. He knew that the time was 
 drawing very short. The friends who had so 
 often waited upon him would not be able to do 
 so much longer. Now, he said, for this once 
 let me wait upon you. And all the grace is lost 
 if we think that his object in doing it was simply 
 to teach them a lesson. It is well to be taught 
 lessons sometimes, I know, but the lesson is 
 singularly ungracious in its effect when it takes 
 
ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 129 
 
 the form of an apparently friendly act, and 
 instead of winning, it repels us and so fails to 
 achieve the thing it aimed at. 
 
 Look at the facts. You do a thing in order to 
 set a good example; that is to say, in order to 
 make other people do it. But to make other 
 people do a thing, you must make them in love 
 with the doing of it. You must make them 
 desire to do it. Now, if they think you do it in 
 order to create that effect upon them, they are 
 merely exasperated. It takes a very holy soul 
 to be attracted by a deliberately set good example. 
 Most of us are repelled. Nor does it seem possible 
 to believe that our Lord ever did this, because 
 there was such an extraordinary directness of 
 purpose in all that he did. He did everything 
 he did because it was a thing that seemed to him 
 worth doing; not with some ulterior object, not 
 in order to get a good effect, or to create any 
 kind of effect at all, he never did anything just to 
 shock people, or just to please people. He taught 
 us in parable after parable, in saying after saying, 
 in act after act, the beauty and the worth of 
 single-mindedness. That is really what the 
 loveliest of all the beatitudes means. ‘‘Blessed 
 are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” 
 It does not mean physical chastity. It means 
 singleness of mind—that singleness of mind 
 which is so marked a quality in children and 
 must, I think, be one of the reasons why our 
 
130 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 Lord told us to ‘‘become as little children.” A 
 child’s absorption in the thing that it is doing is 
 amazing. It is a power that most of us lose as 
 we grow up. Genius keeps it but most of us 
 lose it, and it is a quality most dear to Christ. 
 I have known a little boy of six who stood in a 
 queue for one and a quarter hours in order to 
 ride for two minutes on an elephant in the Zoo. 
 At intervals of a quarter of an hour we went and 
 asked him if he would not like to go away and 
 ride on a camel or a llama instead; but no, he 
 would not, and I believe if he had had to stand 
 six hours he would have done it. There is a 
 power of absorption in a child’s mind when it is 
 really concentrated on what it is doing, which is 
 part of its charm. Real singleness of mind is a 
 very lovable characteristic. 
 
 How constant it wasin our Lord. His disciples 
 were plucking ears of corn on the Sabbath Day, 
 and the Pharisees appealed to our Lord to rebuke 
 them because it was against their law. If there 
 had been a shadow of double-mindedness in our 
 Lord, if he had ever thought it a good thing to 
 try to set a good example, he would surely have 
 said to his disciples, ‘‘Now this is a very unim- 
 portant thing. It cannot possibly matter to you 
 whether you pluck these ears of corn or not. 
 Meanwhile, you are giving offence to some sin- 
 cerely religious people. Therefore do not do 
 it.’ What would have been the consequence? 
 
ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 131 
 
 He would have created the impression that he 
 really believed that God cared whether they 
 plucked ears of corn on the Sabbath Day or not. 
 He would have given his formal adhesion to an 
 idea of God which was dishonourable, narrow, and 
 contemptible. He would really, although the 
 matter seemed such a little thing, have undone 
 his own work, for he came to reveal God in all 
 his glory, his grace, his spaciousness, his freedom, 
 and if he had sought for a moment—in order 
 not to give offence—to ‘‘set a good example’’ to 
 others, because after all it zs good to keep the 
 Sabbath Day holy—if he had said, ‘‘Refrain from 
 doing this thing,” it would really at the back of 
 it have meant that he accepted the idea, and pro- 
 claimed it by his action, that these infinitesimal 
 trifles are a matter of concern to God. It was 
 the character of God that was concerned. 
 
 Or again, when he healed a man with a withered 
 hand, he knew that people were watching to see 
 whether he would do this on the Sabbath Day; 
 yet he did it, and rebuked them. Might he not 
 easily have waited till the next day? A man’s 
 hand does not wither in a moment! The afflic- 
 tion must have been slowly getting worse and 
 worse for years. He might have said, ‘‘To- 
 morrow I shall come and heal you,’’ and the 
 Pharisees would have been left without a pretext 
 for offence. But our Lord would not wait for 
 twenty-four hours, he would not give to any- 
 
132 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 one the impression that he believed it wrong to 
 do right on the Sabbath Day. He would not 
 give the impression that such things are of value 
 in the sight of God at all, for the Son of Man is 
 Lord also of the Sabbath. 
 
 We do not keep the Sabbath Day any longer, 
 but keep Sunday instead. Saturday is not any 
 longer a holy day, but Sunday is, and how many 
 times I have been urged not to do this, or that, 
 or the other, on Sunday because ‘‘it will cause 
 you to be misunderstood.’”’ What would be the 
 real misunderstanding? I tell you it would be 
 the idea that I thought that God cares about 
 such things; and I do not think it. I am urged 
 to avoid misunderstanding, but do I not actually 
 create misunderstanding if I do what does not 
 seem to me, in itself, a thing: worth while, in case 
 some of you should think that it was not im- 
 portant to have one day of rest and spiritual 
 refreshment in a week? I do think it important. 
 I think it very important. Well, now, if I drive 
 my motor car on Sunday, shall I be setting a bad 
 example to all of you? Yes? Well, I set it 
 every Sunday: I tell you frankly. Every Sunday 
 I set it, because I do not really think that God 
 would rather have me walk from Hampstead to 
 Victoria or go ina bus oratube. I do not think 
 these things matter. What matters is that we 
 . should take sufficient time in our lives to be 
 sometimes consciously in the presence of God, 
 
ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 133 
 
 to have spiritual leisure. That is important, and 
 certainly one day in seven is not by any means 
 too much, and everyone should have that. But 
 to do a thing that I myself think is of no impor- 
 tance in order to persuade you that it is a thing of 
 importance, is dishonest. 
 
 Or again, our Lord shocked public opinion by 
 sending away without condemnation a woman 
 who was taken in adultery. They brought her 
 to him and asked, ‘‘What do you think of this? 
 What is your opinion? What do you say about 
 it?’? You may be asked such a thing some day. 
 You perhaps, some of you who are in a public 
 position. All of you at least have some circle 
 of friends or relations to whom what you do may 
 be of weight, to whom your position on a given 
 matter counts for something. Somebody says 
 to you, Here are two people who live together, 
 without being married. You ask about their 
 circumstances, and you find that they are doing 
 what they, at least, believe to be right. You 
 find that, in your own judgment of them, you— 
 I speak for myself at the moment—think they 
 are doing wrong. It'is true that you know also 
 a hundred things that are more wrong, but these 
 are condoned by public opinion. You admit to 
 your family circle someone who is cruel, who is 
 mean, who is spiteful, who is disloyal, a coward, . 
 a skunk and a shirker, because public opinion has 
 decided that these things do not matter very 
 
134 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 much. You exclude from your circle, although 
 not because of your moral judgment, these others, 
 not because they are worse, but because the 
 world’s judgment has decided that they are worse, 
 and if you admit them to your acquaintance, you 
 may be ‘‘misjudged.’”” You may be held to think 
 that these things are of no importance, and you 
 know that they are important. Perhaps you 
 hold them tremendously important. Perhaps 
 they are far more sacred to you than to some of 
 those who judge you. And you argue with 
 yourself, ‘‘I must not make it seem as though 
 I did not think they were important.” Well, 
 and what about all those people who are cruel, 
 and mean, and spiteful? You are not afraid to 
 make these vices seem unimportant! You admit 
 these people to your house, to your acquaintance! 
 Are you not afraid sometimes that you are re- 
 versing the moral judgment of Christ? How 
 easy it is for us now to read that lovely story in the 
 eighth chapter of St. John! How easy to sen- 
 timentalise over it, and think how wonderful our 
 Lord was, how gracious, and how courteous to 
 this woman; and how shocked and scandalised 
 were the people outside, the Pharisees and the 
 others, how hateful they were, how mean and 
 cruel! I do not know any chapter in the Bible, 
 any passage in the Bible, that is more sentimen- 
 talised over than that little passage in St. John. 
 You know, do you not, that it does not belong 
 
ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 135 
 
 there at all. It is not part of the Gospel according 
 to St. John. It is thought that very likely it is 
 really part of St. Luke, and has got in there by 
 mistake. But anyone will tell you, even the 
 most advanced critic, that it is a true story—an 
 authentic record. It bears its truth upon its 
 face, no one but Christ could have acted so. No 
 one could have invented it. It is the very soul 
 and spirit of Christ. It is so glorious and so 
 lovely that Christ probably was told that he 
 would be liable to be misunderstood. Should he 
 not have joined in the condemnation of the world, 
 for after all these things are condemnable? Why 
 should our Lord lay himself open to the charge of 
 thinking that he did not hold adultery to be a 
 great sin? He did think it was a great sin. I 
 think to one so loyal, so selfless, so glorious, it 
 must have seemed a very great sin indeed. But 
 what then? It was a less sin than the hateful 
 cruelty, the prurient curiosity, of those who 
 accused her, and he was not going, for anybody’s 
 sake, or for any consideration, to reverse his own 
 standard of values. To him the cruelty and the 
 meanness of the Pharisees who brought her 
 there was worse than her conduct. Very well, he 
 would let them see it. He would run the risk of 
 being misunderstood. He would not do anything 
 to conform to the world’s standard unless it was 
 truly his standard. In all that he did he was 
 absolutely true to himself, so true that we can 
 
136 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 see nineteen hundred years afterwards, that that 
 little episode is true, although nobody will ever 
 know who wrote it; because it belongs to the 
 mind of the man of whom it was written. 
 
 We are all of us, in whatever situation we find 
 ourselves, constantly tempted to act from double 
 motives. Sometimes we say we are doing it to 
 set a good example, when what we really mean, 
 if we spoke the truth, is that we have not got the 
 courage to set what the world will call a bad 
 example. We have no moral courage, and so 
 we do a thing which isdishonest. It is this setting 
 a good example, doing what we do not really think 
 is worth while, in order that somebody else may 
 think it worth while, that corrupts our honesty, 
 and so rots our very minds, that we do not even 
 know what we think right, because we have not 
 any moral courage. We think we did a thing to 
 set a good example—to avoid causing others to 
 stumble. If we were absolutely straight with 
 ourselves we should see that very often that was 
 not the real motive: the motive was a lack of 
 moral courage. 
 
 We accept standards that are not ours because 
 we do not want people to think something else 
 about us that is wrong. We do not want people 
 to think we think certain things are unimportant, 
 and therefore we allow ourselves to act as though 
 they were the most important things of all; and 
 in that we deceive not only other people, which 
 
ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 137 
 
 is bad enough, but often ourselves too, which 
 is worse. 
 
 Much of our work is wasted and spoiled because 
 its apparent motive is not its realone. I remem- 
 ber a flourishing debating society that used to be 
 held on Sunday afternoons in a poor part of East 
 London. It was part of the work of a settlement. 
 After awhile, the head of the settlement gave 
 it up. People asked why, because it was a very 
 good and flourishing debating society and did 
 very interesting work. He said, ‘‘Because it 
 did not lead to anything.’ And people said, 
 ““To what should it lead?’’ He replied that it 
 had not led to any of them coming forward to be 
 confirmed! That is a kind of double motive that 
 is detestable. If you think it is a good thing to 
 hold a debating society, hold a debating society, 
 but do not hold it because it is going to lead to 
 something else. Do not hold it because it will 
 cause people to come to your church or to lend 
 themselves to some end of which they had not an 
 idea when they first came to it. I do not know 
 of anything that has made organised religion 
 more stink in people’s nostrils than this double ~ 
 motive, this habit of doing a thing, not because 
 it is worth doing, but because it may bring people 
 to go to church. Let them go to church if they 
 want to, or if you have anything on earth to 
 offer to them when they come; but not because 
 they have been led on step by step, doing things 
 
138 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 that you did not really think were worth while in 
 themselves. 
 
 If you do welfare work because you think it 
 will keep the working classes quiet, it is much 
 better not to do it. You will only arouse resent- 
 ment. If you do it because you really desire 
 their welfare, they will be conscious of that too; 
 but if you do it from a double motive, or an undis- 
 closed motive, the work is destroyed. 
 
 I often think half the complaints that we make 
 about ingratitude are really due to the fact that 
 our motives are much less noble than we imagine. 
 Half the time we do kind things to preserve our 
 own self-respect. We cannot respect ourselves, 
 if we do not sometimes do a kind action. Well, 
 then, you have preserved your self-respect! 
 ‘Verily I say unto you, ye have your reward.” 
 Why do you expect gratitude on the top of that? 
 Why should people be grateful for such kindness? 
 You did not do it for their sake! You did it 
 because you could not keep your self-respect if 
 you did not do it. There are men who pray, our 
 Lord says, standing at the street corners, that 
 they may be seen of men. ‘‘Verily I say unto 
 you, they have their reward.’”’ They did it that 
 they might be seen, and they were seen. That is 
 the thing that they wanted. Do they expect an 
 answer to their prayer as well? Why, being 
 seen was the answer. And so, in the things that 
 we do to one another, very often if we probe 
 
ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 139 
 
 ourselves, we find that we are doing a certain 
 thing because we have made a picture of ourselves, 
 or our families have made a picture of us, or our 
 friends, and we want to play up to it. We think, 
 “‘T am a generous and impulsive person,” and so 
 we do generous and impulsive things. It would 
 be a pity to have such a character and not play 
 up to it! It is horrible to think how often one 
 plays up to the part other people have invented 
 for one, or we have invented for ourselves. Verily 
 we have our reward. What more do we want? 
 There is no more subtle means of deterioration 
 than to be always acting up to someone else’s 
 standards, always acting with a double motive, 
 always pretending to be or think something which 
 really we are not and do not think. Do you 
 retnember a passage in Mr. H. G. Wells’ ‘‘The 
 Soul of a Bishop,’’ where the bishop was just 
 going to lose his connection at a station, and 
 there were a crowd of people between him and 
 his train, and he wanted to push and shove, but 
 he did not, because he knew it ‘“‘would not do” 
 for a bishop to push and shove. Have you not 
 done things like that a dozen times? It would 
 not do for you not to play up to the part that 
 you are dressed up to! Of course, the unhappy 
 bishop is always dressed up to his part and never 
 gets a holiday. But you also are dressed up to 
 your part, and often do these things unconsciously. 
 You only suddenly realise—perhaps when it is 
 
1440 ~=SLIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 too late—that you were not doing them because 
 they are or seem to you worth doing. You did 
 not refrain from pushing people because you 
 truly, earnestly dislike pushing them, but because 
 it ‘‘would not do”’ for you to doit. And all the 
 time you know, everybody knows, that the only 
 thing in the world that carries any weight at all 
 is reality; that reality is the only thing that 
 makes any difference at all. All these things 
 that we do for ulterior motives have no effect at 
 all in the world, except this—that they sap our 
 courage and our integrity, so that at last we do 
 not know what we are or what we aim at. 
 
 If this sounds very desperate—for if we try to 
 analyse our motives for doing anything, we are 
 reduced almost to despair at the difficulty of 
 ever acting from an absolutely pure motive— 
 let us take comfort again. It is not a counsel 
 of despair. It is a counsel of hope. What is 
 honest in us does tell. It counts so surely and 
 so certainly that we need not worry about any- 
 thing else. It is the only thing in the world 
 that tells in the end, and it is so certain that it 
 does tell—that if there is one spark of honest 
 thought in the mind of anyone here it will tell, 
 will help, will save not only you but others, that 
 you need not worry any more about whether 
 people misunderstand you or not; you need not 
 worry about the effect you are making in the 
 world. It is like going into the open air to realise 
 
ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 141 
 
 that we need not worry about all that; that what 
 we need to worry about is only our own honesty; 
 that if we are honest we need not worry about 
 whether what we do is going to be properly under- 
 stood or rightly judged. Whatever is real in us 
 is going to tell—and nothing else. 
 
 Suppose you are misunderstood by your own 
 family or your friends. Suppose the things that 
 you have tried to do best and noblest have been 
 attributed to some mean motive. Suppose your 
 world does not understand you. Suppose that 
 you are trying and agonising to do better and 
 people try to keep you in the old rut because 
 they have always seen you there and do not 
 believe you are ever going to come out. Suppose 
 all the misunderstanding that you like. It does 
 not matter. The world cannot imprison you in 
 these misunderstandings. It cannot. Whatever 
 is real in yourself is bound to win through, bound 
 to tell, and it is a relief to the very soul to know 
 that, after all, ‘‘only the Master can praise us, 
 and only the Master can blame,’’ that we have 
 only one standard that matters, and that in pro- 
 portion as we satisfy it we do ‘‘count”’ while all 
 the rest passes and does not matter. There is 
 only one way to avoid being either a hypocrite 
 or a prig, I think, and that is to measure ourselves 
 continually against the standard of Christ, which 
 was so adequate, so perfect, so true. Do not 
 mind if in the world’s judgment you are con- 
 
142 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 demned or misunderstood. Do not mind even 
 if you must condemn yourself, but measure your- 
 self against the standard of Christ, and in doing 
 that you will be saved both from self-complacency 
 and from despair, for you will know that what- 
 ever of reality there is in you, that our Lord can 
 use and will use in the service of God. 
 
ON MAKING GOOD RESOLUTIONS 
 
 | PY ean the next few days all properly con- 
 
 stituted people will be engaged in making 
 good resolutions. I say all properly constituted 
 people, because the only ones who do not make 
 good resolutions before New Year’s Day are lazy 
 people who think they have got far enough, or 
 anyhow are not going any further, and who are 
 mostly found among the old; cynical people who 
 remind us that the way to hell is paved with good 
 resolutions, and who are often found among the 
 young; and prosaic people who point out that as 
 a matter of fact nothing particular happens on 
 December 31st—that this date is a purely artificial 
 way of marking the passage of time; that it is 
 quite as germane to make good resolutions on 
 April 1st as on December 31st. But the rest of 
 us—and let us hope the rest of us are in the 
 majority—really do make good resolutions on 
 every December 31st, and on January Ist we 
 make a fresh start. 
 
 If you are not one of that majority I want you 
 to join it to-night. For we are not as nice as 
 we might be. We might all be better than we 
 
 143 
 
144. LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 are! That is true of all of us, even the saints, 
 even the pleasantest and the most lovable. We 
 all might be a little bit better than we are. We 
 could all begin to be so now, for no one is too old 
 to start, and we have all got to arrive some day 
 at the idea that God has for us. It is no use 
 thinking we shall be let off—at least I think not. 
 I think the idea that God sometimes in the end 
 gives us up is a lazy delusion. It is far more 
 terrifying in a sense to realise that God will never 
 give us up, and that if we do not make a fresh 
 start at the end of this year the time will come 
 when we shall have to make a fresh start, and 
 the longer we put it off the further we shall have 
 to go. That God of ours, who has been so won- 
 derfully described by a great poet as the ‘‘Hound 
 of Heaven,’ will never cease to pursue us. 
 ‘‘Though I go down into hell thou art there also.”’ 
 And so through other states and other lives, 
 perhaps, God will pursue us until we do decide to 
 make a fresh start. 
 
 Why not now? Perhaps because there is a 
 sneaking fear in our hearts—not only of the 
 cynic, the lazy, and the prosaic, but in all of us— 
 a little dread of making good resolutions because 
 our minds go mournfully back to December 3Ist, 
 1923—1922—1921I—as far back as we can re- 
 member—and, without being cynics, we cannot 
 help wondering whether it is really worth while. 
 We made such a deplorable mess of our resolutions 
 
-ON MAKING GOOD RESOLUTIONS 145 
 
 last time, and making them once more only 
 reminds us what failures we made before. 
 
 Then, also, at the back of our minds is a feeling 
 that it is very difficult for us to start again. - 
 There are so many things in our lives over which 
 we have no control, which make it very difficult 
 for us to be as nice as we really feel we might be. 
 We let ourselves off, in our minds, because we 
 reflect—and often quite justly—that there are 
 many things which we cannot help, things outside 
 ourselves; or if they are within us, we did not 
 put them there! And these things make it 
 extremely difficult for us to be hopeful about 
 making a fresh start. I remember being struck 
 with the fact that the teaching of psychology, 
 especially when it is only rather crudely under- 
 stood, sometimes encourages people in that 
 hopelessness. Everything that they do wrong, 
 everything that is disagreeable and difficult in 
 their natures, is referred back to something that 
 happened to them a long time ago, so long ago 
 that they cannot be held responsible for it; some- 
 thing done to them by people who had charge of 
 them when little. If your psychology stops there 
 (as, with some people, it unfortunately does), 
 it does make you feel you cannot really be any 
 better. You cannot undo the past, you cannot 
 eliminate the things that happened to you long 
 ago, for which you are paying now, not through 
 your fault. Therefore it seems as though you 
 
146 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 might let yourself off the effort of trying to be a 
 little nicer. I remember a boy who was told that 
 all his difficulties arose from the way in which 
 his parents had handled him when he was a child. 
 He felt profoundly resentful against them. But 
 it never seems to have occurred to him that his 
 father, who was the chief offender according to 
 the psycho-analyst, had very likely himself suf- 
 fered from precisely the same mishandling when 
 he was a child. I never saw two people more 
 alike than that father and son! If therefore the 
 son was what he was because his father had mis- 
 handled him, it is at least possible that his father 
 was what he was because his father had mis- 
 handled him! In that case we are all in a vicious 
 circle, unless all that has been done to and in- 
 flicted upon us by older people can be redeemed; 
 unless it is possible for the individual to make a 
 fresh start in spite of all. The vicious circle will 
 go on for ever, from father to son, from generation 
 to generation and, although we may learn to bea 
 little more merciful in our judgment of one 
 another, we are not really helped to make a fresh 
 start. 
 
 In order to do that, we must understand where 
 we now are, and cease to dwell with mournful 
 insistence on what we were. What we were is 
 no place to start from. We have to start, if we 
 start at all, from where we are. 
 
 Two men lost their way in Ireland and asked 
 
ON MAKING GOOD RESOLUTIONS 147 
 
 an Irishman to tell them the way to Dublin. He 
 said, “If it was to Dublin I was going it would 
 not be from here I would be starting.’’ That is 
 often our answer to the difficulties of life! We 
 continually try to start not from where we are, 
 but from where we are not, and when we fail we 
 do not realise that it is because we do not take 
 the situation exactly as it is now and start from 
 there, but think to ourselves, “‘If I were going to 
 heaven it is not these parents I would have chosen. 
 If I were going to be good, attractive and lovable, 
 it is not with this family, in this home, in this job, 
 with this disagreeable set of people I would have 
 started.”” But we can only start from where we 
 are! Therefore we must take our situation as it 
 stands, with all our parents’ imperfections on 
 their heads, and all our imperfections on our 
 heads, and all the difficulties of work, family, 
 surroundings, temperament, ancestors, and every- 
 thing else we should have chosen otherwise—start 
 with the whole set complete! That is what is 
 meant by starting from where you are. Where 
 you are is the only moment of time and the only 
 foot of space you have really got for certain. It 
 is the one firm place from which you can jump, 
 and the best jumper in the world cannot jump 
 from anywhere but where he stands. That is 
 what most of us on New Year’s Eve forget. We 
 think we could make good if people had not made 
 such a mess of our surroundings, and we do not 
 
148 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 realise that this involves us in a vicious circle, 
 for unless the individual is sufficiently master of 
 himself and his circumstances to take them all 
 and yet to make a fine life of it, the world will 
 never be an inch further on than it is now. 
 
 Let us begin by being a little kinder to each 
 other. ‘‘Who art thou that judgest thy brother? 
 To his own Master he stands or falls, and he shall 
 stand, for the Master has power to make him 
 stand.” With all the unkind and cruel things 
 people have done to you, there are also some kind 
 things you might have done and did not. As you 
 were wronged and resented it, and feel that 
 you can never escape from the injury so done to 
 you, because it has cramped your very soul, so 
 may you cramp, or not cramp, the souls of other 
 people. If society has wronged you, given you 
 the wrong work, taken away your vocation, done 
 anything evil to you, do not you make common 
 cause with all that wrong by doing the same to 
 other people. We might take human kindness 
 a little less for granted than we do. We take so 
 much for granted. 
 
 And do not start from what other people 
 expect of you. They do not know you, after all. 
 Start from what God expects of you. We are 
 told so often—and it is true—that most people 
 react to what is expected of them. Almost all 
 of us are, very largely, what people around us 
 expect us to be. Suppose they do not expect 
 
ON MAKING GOOD RESOLUTIONS 149 
 
 much of us? How shall we rise above that? 
 Why, think what God expects of you! ‘‘Be ye 
 therefore perfect, even as your Father which is 
 in heaven is perfect.’’ The great expectation of 
 God, which some day you will have to meet— 
 fix your mind on that. For it is true that we 
 are what is expected of us, and if we turn away 
 our wandering eyes always seeking the judgment 
 of man, and fix them on God, we shall find an 
 expectation, a divine waiting and patience for 
 us to be some glorious thing. God knows what 
 we are capable of. He knows us better than 
 anyone else can. God expected the return of 
 the prodigal son when anyone else would have 
 given him up. God, in the person of our Lord, 
 said to the woman taken in adultery, not only 
 ‘‘Neither do I condemn thee,”’ but ‘‘Go and sin 
 no more.” Was that not divine? ‘‘Neither do 
 I condemn thee’; but more glorious still that 
 last, ‘‘Go and sin no more.” Put yourself in 
 her place if you can, and think how difficult it 
 was for her to ‘‘sin no more.” A woman who 
 has sinned in such a sense, and who is known so 
 to have sinned, is thrust out of society in a way 
 which it is probably impossible for us to realise 
 unless it has happened to us. Perhaps some 
 of those who spend their lives in trying to help 
 such women understand it. Even now, when 
 moral standards are supposed to be laxer—when 
 there is at least a gentler attitude towards such 
 
150 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 women—even now it is extraordinary how, when 
 once a woman is publicly branded as a sinner, she 
 will be pushed right outside the world, as though 
 she were something incapable of human society, 
 no longer human, a person who has lost her rights, 
 fair game for any licentious.man. ‘This is the 
 origin of that fable that a woman never recovers 
 from such a fall; the world has taken care that 
 she does not recover! 
 
 This woman, then, among the Jews, who drew 
 a very hard line between the virtuous and the 
 unvirtuous, this woman has been taken in adul- 
 tery, in the very act, and surrounded by a crowd 
 of men she is brought through the streets and 
 set there before the Master for sentence. He 
 says, ‘“Go and sin no more.’’ Might she not 
 well ask, ‘“‘How is that possible? How can I 
 live at all when I am an outcast from society, 
 when all the world knows what I have done? 
 That I have done the thing that in a woman is 
 unforgivable? How is it possible for me to sin 
 no more? ‘There is no other way of life open to 
 me.’’ And yet that story bears on its face the 
 mark of its divine origin. No one but Christ 
 could have said a thing so lovely and sublime. 
 With the absence of condemnation is the expec- 
 tation of a virtue which must in the future be 
 heroic, ‘‘Go and sin no more.’’ If it was possible 
 for her so must it be possible for all of us. There 
 is not a person in the world for whom it could 
 
ON MAKING GOOD RESOLUTIONS 151 
 
 have been more difficult than for that woman. 
 Yet God expected this heroic virtue of her, and 
 expects it no less of you and me. If we have 
 failed every year since we began to make good 
 resolutions, if we are utterly weary of the business 
 of making a fresh start, if our vices have become 
 like a chain upon us, if we are slaves of big or little 
 evil habits (and the little ones are often quite as 
 hard to break and quite as destructive of the 
 happiness of others as the big ones), still let us 
 lift up our eyes from our own discouragement 
 and the discouragement of others, and fix them 
 upon the great expectation of God. 
 
 If we do this for ourselves, let us also do it for 
 other people. I sometimes think if Christ had 
 stopped at this, ‘‘Neither do I condemn thee,”’ 
 he would have been more cruel than kind. For 
 there are many people who do not condemn us 
 any longer for the things we do because they have 
 ceased to expect anything better. We have been 
 selfish, irritable, lazy, difficult, bad-tempered so 
 long that they decide now to put up with us, and 
 not to expect us to do better. They remind 
 themselves that we have a difficult temperament, 
 and that after all we have good sides to our 
 character, we have good points. They will not 
 ask more of us now. 
 
 ‘‘Neither do I condemn thee.’ If Christ had 
 stopped there, as I say, he would have been almost 
 more cruel than kind, but as he did not stop there, 
 
152 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 
 
 do not you stop there either. Do not expect 
 your friends to do no better. They are trying 
 quite as hard as you, perhaps a great deal harder. 
 Perhaps they have got a great deal further already 
 than you realise, and while you are expecting 
 them to walk along the same old road you are 
 doing your best to keep them there. It is one 
 of the most pathetic things in human nature that 
 when a boy or girl, at the New Year, or on a 
 birthday, or at some other time, with high resolve 
 determines—what shall I say?—not to be late 
 for breakfast! everyone says, ‘‘What! you punc- 
 tual! What on earth has come over you?”’ Do 
 you think that shy young soul will ever dare to be 
 punctual again? Or if you are kind or brave— 
 or anything that you have not been in the habit 
 of being—what discouraging looks of surprise 
 will greet you! Even if your relations (it is 
 generally relations) do not say anything, they 
 look it, and all the spirit goes out of you. Let 
 us try not to hold other people back so. If you 
 are not going to make any other good resolutions 
 at all, make that one. Believe that the other 
 people, not only your friends, though perhaps 
 especially your friends, but all the people around 
 you are really trying. Perhaps the thing we 
 sneer at as another bad failure has already driven 
 them almost to despair, because they had thought 
 they were getting on a little better and suddenly 
 they break down. If we had noticed more that 
 
ON MAKING GOOD RESOLUTIONS 153 
 
 they were getting on a little better, and noticed 
 less that every now and then they do break down, 
 if we had shared something of that divine expec- 
 tation of God for all the people around us, perhaps 
 December 31st would not find them too dis- 
 couraged to make any more resolutions at all. 
 Do not let us be cynical about ourselves, but also 
 do not let us be cynical about other people. Let 
 them also start from where they are and not 
 from somewhere where we saw them years ago. 
 
 The passing of time, the marking of the passage 
 of time which we call the Old Year and the New, 
 brings us into the presence of eternity. It is a 
 strange paradox that these conventional periods 
 and dates should bring us to eternity, but they do. 
 We see things for a moment against the back- 
 ground of our own immortality. We realise, if 
 only for an hour, that we must awake out of sleep 
 and cast from us the works of darkness, and put 
 upon us the armour of light. Here and now we 
 set out; let us set out for something nobler, braver, 
 freer than we have been in the past. The cynics 
 tell us that the way to hell is paved with good 
 resolutions; they forget that the way to heaven 
 has a precisely similar pavement. 
 

 
Putnam Books Dealing with the 
 Religious and Social Questions 
 of the Moment 
 
 Miss Maude Royden is one of the remarkable clerical figures 
 of the present age. A graduate of Oxford, she began her life’s 
 work in social service among the poor of the Liverpool slums. 
 Feeling the need of religion in the every day life of the citizens, 
 humble or great, with whom she became familiar, she took up 
 preaching, and for three years was pulpit assistant at the City 
 Temple in London. She now preaches every Sunday in the 
 Guildhouse, Eccleston Square, of the same great city, and her 
 teachings have made their way around the world. Her books are 
 read everywhere. Her creed is that of common sense tempered 
 by deep religious feeling and applied in a fashion for which there 
 is ange a need as there has ever been in the history of the 
 world. 
 
 MISS ROYDEN is the author of the following books:— 
 Sex and Common Sense 
 Prayer as a Force 
 Political Christianity 
 
 During the present year, the Putnams have brought out two 
 new books by Miss Royden which are of singular interest and 
 importance at this time to church going citizens. They are: 
 
 Beauty in Religion, in which she deals with some 
 new aspects of Christianity. ‘‘The assurance of God,’’ writes 
 Miss Royden, ‘‘comes to most of us through beauty.” Of this 
 book, the London Spectator says, ‘‘it transports us to a higher 
 level and into a larger air.”’ 
 
 And 
 
 The Friendship of God, in which Miss Royden 
 
 deals directly with the field she has made peculiarly her own—the 
 relation of Christianity to every day life. It is a soothing book 
 and one to inspire faith where doubt has once been. 
 
 G. P. Putnam’s Sons 
 New York London 
 
 
 
The Revelation of 
 God in Nature 
 
 By Rev. C. J. Shebbeare 
 
 and 
 
 Joseph McCabe 
 
 May the beauty and harmony of nature be 
 attributed to the action of a creative and pre- 
 siding mind? This absorbing and always new 
 question is discussed with skill and insight by 
 the Chaplain to the King of England, and one 
 of the foremost Rationalists of the day. The 
 two authors present their respective arguments 
 with dignity and thoroughness. What they have 
 to say is of interest and stimulating, not alone to 
 the professing Christian, but to every thinking 
 man and woman, to every individual who finds 
 himself perplexed by the problem of the Creator. 
 There is in the book no dogma, no violence, no 
 ugly self-assertion. The reader may hear both 
 sides and form his own opinion. 
 
 G. P. Putnam’s Sons 
 New York London