h and select a profession on it, instead of
taking up some splendid, serious, dignified calling he would devote
himself to a comparatively small and humble-looking career--that of
jogging people's minds. This might not seem at first sight to be a
sufficiently large thing for an archangel to do, but if it were to be
done at all (those who have tried it think) it would take an archangel
to do it.

The only possible practical or businesslike substitute one can think of
in modern life for an archangel would have to be an Institution of some
kind. Some huge, pleasant Mutual Association for Jogging People's Minds
might do a little something perhaps, but it would not be very thorough.
The people who need it most, half or three-quarters of them, the
treadmill-conscientious, dear, rutty, people of this world, would not be
touched by it. What is really wanted, if anything is really to be done
in the way of jogging, is a new day in the week.

I have always thought that there ought to be a day, one day in the week,
to do wrong in--not very wrong, but wrong enough to answer the
purpose--a perfectly irresponsible, delectable, inconsequent day--a
sabbath of whims. There ought to be a sort of sabbath for things that
never get done because they are too good or not good enough. Letters
that ought to be postponed until others are written, letters to friends
that never dun, books that don't bear on anything, books that no one has
asked one to read, calls on unexpecting people, bills that might just as
well wait, tinkering around the house on the wrong things, the right
ones, perfectly helpless, standing by. Sitting with one's feet a little
too high (if possible on one's working desk), being a little foolish and
liking it--making poor puns, enjoying one's bad grammar--a day, in
short, in which, whatever a man is, he rests from himself and play
marbles with his soul.

Most people nowadays--at least the intellectual, so-called, and the
learned above all others--are so far gone under the reading-for-results
theory that they have become mere work-worshippers in books, worshippers
of work which would not need to be performed at all--most of it--by men
with healthy natural or fully exercised spiritual organs. One very
seldom catches a man in the act nowadays of doing any old-fashioned or
important reading. The old idea of reading for athletics instead of
scientifics has almost no provision made for it in the modern
intellectual man's life. He