es from a child, is a mind that is just as apt to be aggressive
in its small conceptions as the most capacious and sumptuously
furnished, and more rigorous in its treatment of dependents. I have
found that the untrained mind is untrained in the qualities of
appreciation, is not cleanly, nor workmanlike, nor spiritual, nor
generous, nor tolerant; that the very fundamentals of its integrity will
hurt you; that it talks much and is not ashamed.

All literature has overdone the dog-like fidelity of simple minds. The
essence of loyalty of man to man is made of love-capacity and
understanding--and these are qualities that come from evolution of the
soul just as every other fine thing comes.

We perceive the old farmer on his door-step in the evening--love and
life-lines of labour upon him; we enjoy his haleness and laughter....
But that is the mask. His mind and its every attribute of consciousness
is designed to smother an awakened soul. You have to bring God to him in
his own terminology, or he will fight you, and believe in his heart that
he is serving his God. His generation is moving slowly now, yet if his
sons and daughters quicken their pace, he is filled with torments of
fear or curses them for straying.

I would not seem ill-tempered. I have long since healed from the chaos
and revelations of building. It brought me a not too swift review of
life as I had met it afield and in the cities for many years. The fact
that one little contract for certain interior installations was strung
over five months, and surprised me with the possibilities of
inefficiency and untruth, is long since forgotten. The water runs. Ten
days after peace was established here, all my wounds were healing by
first intention; and when I saw the carpenters at work on a new contract
the day after they left me, the pity that surged through my breast was
strangely poignant, and it was for them. The conduct of their days was a
drive through the heaviest and most stubborn of materials, an arriving
at something like order against the grittiest odds, and they must do it
again and again. There is none to whom I cannot bow in the evening--but
the idealisation of the village lives is changed and there is knowledge.

I had been getting too comfortable. One cannot do his service in the
world and forget its fundamentals. We have to love before we can serve,
but it is fatuous to love blindly. The things that we want are ahead.
The paths behind do not contain t