we pretend to be endeavoring to promote. Officiousness is
self-seeking dressed up in the uniform of service. The officious person,
instead of losing his private self in the larger life of society, tries
to use the larger interests of society in such a way as to make them
gratify his own personal vanity and sense of self-importance.

THE PENALTY.

+All meanness and self-seeking are punished by lack of freedom or
constraint; though frequently the constraint is inward and spiritual
rather than outward and physical.+--We have seen that to the man of
generous public spirit society presents a career for the unfolding and
expansion of his social powers. To such a man society, with its claims
and obligations, is an enlargement of his range of sympathy, a widening
of his spiritual horizon, and on that account a means of larger liberty
and fuller freedom.

To the mean and selfish man, on the contrary, society presents itself as
an alien force, a hard task-master, making severe requirements upon his
time, imposing cramping limitations on his self-indulgence, levying
heavy taxes upon his substance; prescribing onerous rules and
regulations for his conduct.

By excluding society from the sphere of interests with which he
identifies himself, the mean man, by his own meanness, makes society
antagonistic to him, and himself its reluctant and unwilling slave.
Serve it to some extent he must; but the selfishness and meanness of his
own attitude toward it, makes social service, not the willing and joyous
offering of a free and devoted heart, but the slavish submission of a
reluctant will, forced to do the little that it cannot help doing by
legal or social compulsion.

To him society is not a sphere of freedom, in which his own nature is
enlarged, intensified, liberated; and so made richer, happier, nobler,
and freer. To him society is an external power, compelling him to make
sacrifices he does not want to make; to do things he does not want to
do; to contribute money which he grudges, and to conform to requirements
which he hates. By trying to save the life of self-interest and
meanness, he loses the life of generous aims, noble ideals, and heroic
self devotion.

By refusing the career of noble freedom which social service offers to
each member of the social body, he is constrained to obey a social law
which he has not helped to create, and to serve the interests of a
society of which he has refused to be in spirit and truth a