ey-Road Girl, whom I met rarely,
shook her head at me once, though I had to look close to catch it. The
little girl declared, with a heartbroken look, that the Chapel would
never be the same again after cabbage had been cooked there.
"But it was a wonderful young cabbage from the garden," I said. "And
then the Chapel cannot be hurt by being so differently valuable just
now. It is seeing us through these hard days."
But _I_ missed something through these days; the fact of the matter is,
my thoughts were not so buoyant as usual through the last half of the
days, nor nearly so decent. Something I missed deeply, and moved about
as one does trying to recall a fine dream. The little group had given me
a joy each day that I hadn't realised adequately. That was the secret. I
had been refreshed daily as a workman; learned each day things that I
didn't know; and because of these hours, I had expressed better in the
writing part of the life, the things I did know. Certainly they taught
me the needs of saying exactly what I meant. All of which to suggest
again that teaching is a mutual service. Just here I want to reprint the
first and last thought, so far as I see it, as regards the first
objection: These paragraphs are taken from a former essay on Work,
published in the book called _Midstream_.
"Work and life to me mean the same thing. Through work in my case, a
transfer of consciousness was finally made from animalism to a certain
manhood. This is the most important transaction in the world. Our
hereditary foes are the priests and formalists who continue to separate
a man's work from his religion. A working idea of God comes to the man
who has found his work--and the splendid discovery invariably follows,
that his work is the best expression of God. All education that does not
first aim to find the student's life-work is vain, often demoralising;
because, if the student's individual force is little developed, he sinks
deeper into the herd, under the levelling of the class-room.
"There are no men or women alive, of too deep visioning, nor of too
lustrous a humanity, for the task of showing boys and girls their work.
No other art answers so beautifully. This is the intensive cultivation
of the human spirit. This is world-parenthood, the divine profession.
"_I would have my country call upon every man who shows vision and
fineness in any work, to serve for an hour or two each day, among the
schools of his neighbourhood, te
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