his countryman blessed because he is not tortured by beholding
the poverty of the city--

neque ille
Aut doluit miserans inopem, aut invidit habenti?

And is not the _AEneid_ surcharged with pitying love for mankind, "the
sense of tears in mortal things"? So the life and words of St. Francis of
Assisi are full of the breath of brotherly love--not brotherhood with all
men merely, but with the swallows and the coneys, the flowers, and even
the inanimate things of nature. And the letters of St. Catherine of Siena
are aflame with passionate love of suffering men.

But there is something deplorably new in these more modern books,
something which makes of humanitarianism a cloak for what is most lax and
materialistic in the age. I mean their false emphasis, their neglect of
the individual soul's responsibility to itself, their setting up of human
love in a shrine where hitherto we worshipped the image of God, their
limiting of morality and religion to altruism. I deny flatly that
"Democracy ... affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith," as
Miss Addams says; I deny that "to attain individual morality in an age
demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal
effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to
apprehend the situation"; I say we do _not_ "know, at last, that we can
only discover truth by rational and democratic interest in life." Why did
you quote these sentences with approval? There is no distinction between
individual and social morality, or, if there is, the order is quite the
other way. All this democratic sympathy and social hysteria is merely the
rumour in the lower rooms of our existence. Still to-day, as always, in
the upper chamber, looking out on the sky, dwells the solitary soul,
concerned with herself and her God. She passes down now and again into the
noise and constant coming and going of the lower rooms to speak a word of
encouragement or admonition, but she returns soon to her own silence and
her own contemplation. (The heart of a St. Anthony in the desert of Egypt,
the heart of many a lonely Hindu sage knows a divine joy of communication
of which Hull House with its human sympathies has no conception.) Morality
is the soul's debt to herself.

It is a striking and significant fact that these humanitarians are
continually breaking the simplest rules of honesty and decent living.
Rouss