rate vivid entity, a real,
whole man: dependent on the Whole, and gladly so dependent,
yet within that Whole a free self-governing thing. Perhaps you
always fancied that your will was free--that you were actually, as
you sometimes said, the "captain of your soul." If so, this was
merely one amongst the many illusions which supported your
old, enslaved career. As a matter of fact, you were driven along a
road, unaware of anything that lay beyond the hedges, pressed on
every side by other members of the flock; getting perhaps a
certain satisfaction out of the deep warm stir of the collective life,
but ignorant of your destination, and with your personal initiative
limited to the snatching of grass as you went along, the pushing
of your way to the softer side of the track. These operation? made
up together that which you called Success. But now, because you
have achieved a certain power of gathering yourself together,
perceiving yourself as a person, a spirit, and observing your
relation with these other individual lives--because too, hearing
now and again the mysterious piping of the Shepherd, you realise
your own perpetual forward movement and that of the flock, in
its relation to that living guide--you have a far deeper, truer
knowledge than ever before both of the general and the individual
existence; and so are able to handle life with a surer hand.

Do not suppose from this that your new career is to be perpetually
supported by agreeable spiritual contacts, or occupy itself
in the mild contemplation of the great world through which
you move. True, it is said of the Shepherd that he carries the
lambs in his bosom: but the sheep are expected to walk, and put
up with the inequalities of the road, the bunts and blunders of the
flock. It is to vigour rather than to comfort that you are called.
Since the transcendental aspect of your being has been brought
into focus you are now raised out of the mere push-forward, the
blind passage through time of the flock, into a position of creative
responsibility. You are aware of personal correspondences with
the Shepherd. You correspond, too, with a larger, deeper, broader
world. The sky and the hedges, the wide lands through which you
are moving, the corporate character and meaning of the group to
which you belong--all these are now within the circle of your
consciousness; and each little event, each separate demand or
invitation which comes to you is now seen in a truer proporti