ing be done? We have some vague conception of the ideal that we
would approach; but how changeable still, and illusory, is this ideal!
It is lessened by all that is still unknown to us in the universe, by
all that we do not perceive or perceive incompletely, by all that we
question too superficially. It is hedged round by the most insidious
dangers; it falls victim to the strangest oblivion, the most
inconceivable blunders. Of all our ideals it is the one that we should
watch with the greatest care and anxiety, with the most passionate,
pious eagerness and solicitude. What seems irreproachably just to us
at the moment is probably the merest fraction of what would seem just
could we shift our point of view. We need only compare what we were
doing yesterday with what we do to-day; and what we do to-day would
appear full of faults against equity, were it granted to us to rise
still higher, and compare it with what we shall do to-morrow. There
needs but a passing event, a thought that uses, a duty to ourselves
that takes definite form, an unexpected responsibility that is suddenly
made clear, for the whole organisation of our inward justice to totter
and be transformed. Slow as our advance may have been, we still should
find it impossible to begin life over again in the midst of many a
sorrow whereof we were the involuntary cause, many a discouragement to
which we unconsciously gave rise; and yet, when these things came into
being around us, we appeared to be in the right, and did not consider
ourselves unjust. And even so are we convinced to-day of our excellent
intentions, even so do we tell ourselves that we are the cause if no
suffering and no tears, that we stay not a murmur of happiness, shorten
no moment of peace or of love; and it may be that there passes,
unperceived of us, to our right or our left, an illimitable injustice
that spreads over three-fourths of our life.

25

I chanced to-day to take up a copy of the "Arabian Nights," in the very
remarkable translation recently published by Dr. Mardrus; and I
marvelled at the extraordinary picture it gives of the ancient,
long-vanished civilisations. Not in the Odyssey or the Bible, in
Xenophon or Plutarch, could their teaching be more clearly set forth.
There is one story that the Sultana Schahrazade tells--it is one of the
very finest the volume contains--that reveals a life as pure and as
admirable as mankind ever has known; a life replete with beauty,