t, only when the tow-rope is removed from him. And as it is with
these boatmen and with all people who perform ordinary work, so it is
with the affairs of all humanity. All that each man needs is not to
remove the tow-rope, but to pull away on it in the direction which his
master orders. And, for this purpose, one sort of reason is bestowed on
all men, in order that the direction may be always the same. And this
direction has obviously been so plainly indicated, that both in the life
of all the people about us, and in the conscience of each individual man,
only he who does not wish to work can say that he does not see it. Then,
what is the outcome of this?

This: that one, perhaps two men, will pull; a third will look on, and
will join them; and in this manner the best people will unite until the
affair begins to start, and make progress, as though itself inspiring and
bidding thereto even those who do not understand what is being done, and
why it is being done. First, to the contingent of men who are
consciously laboring in order to comply with the law of God, there will
be added the people who only half understand and who only half confess
the faith; then a still greater number of people who admit the same
doctrine will join them, merely on the faith of the originators; and
finally the majority of mankind will recognize this, and then it will
come to pass, that men will cease to ruin themselves, and will find
happiness.

This will happen,--and it will be very speedily,--when people of our set,
and after them a vast majority, shall cease to think it disgraceful to
pay visits in untanned boots, and not disgraceful to walk in overshoes
past people who have no shoes at all; that it is disgraceful not to
understand French, and not disgraceful to eat bread and not to know how
to set it; that it is disgraceful not to have a starched shirt and clean
clothes, and not disgraceful to go about in clean garments thereby
showing one's idleness; that it is disgraceful to have dirty hands, and
not disgraceful not to have hands with callouses.

All this will come to pass when the sense of the community shall demand
it. But the sense of the community will demand this when those delusions
in the imagination of men, which have concealed the truth from them,
shall have been abolished. Within my own recollection, great changes
have taken place in this respect. And these changes have taken place
only because the general opinion h