I did more and more what they really asked, for therein and not
elsewhere I had a certain authority. More and more accurately I learned
to furnish what they came for. All my work in the study alone was to do
just that for a larger class, and in this effort I stumbled upon the
very heart of the fatherhood ideal and the educational ideal--for they
are one and the same.

A man is at his best in those periods in which self-interest is lost to
him. The work in which a man can lose the sense of self for the most
hours each day--that is his especial task. When the workman gives forth
the best that is in him, not feeling his body, above all its passions
and petty devices for ruling him, concentrated upon the task, a pure
instrument of his task and open to all inspiration regarding it--that
man is safe and superb. There is something holy in the crafts and arts.
It is not an accident that a painting lives three hundred years. We are
not permitted to forget the great potters, the great metallists, the rug
and tapestry makers. They put themselves in their tasks, and we are very
long in coming to the end of their fineness.

They produced. They made their dreams come true in matter; and that is
exactly what our immortal selves are given flesh to perform. Each
workman finds in his own way the secret of the force he represents. He
is an illuminated soul in this discovery. It comes only to a man when he
is giving forth, when he is in love, having lost the love of self.
Giving forth purely the best of self, as the great workmen do, a man is
on the highway to the divine vocation which is the love and service of
humanity.

... They begin to call him twenty minutes before dinner is ready. He is
caught in the dream of the thing and has little time to bargain for it.
He feels for his glasses, when you call him forth; he sweats; he listens
to the forge that calls him. The unfinished thing is not only on his
bench, but in his mind--in its weakness, half-born and uncouth.... "Talk
to my daughter. She knows about these things," he says. "I must go....
Yes, it is a fine day."

It is raining like as not.... And because the world has laughed at him
so long, he has forgotten how to tell his story by the time he has
perfected his task. The world laughs at its betters with the same
facility that it laughs at the half-men. Our national and municipal
fathers should teach us first that the man who has found his work is one
of the kings of the earth.