u have done, and are every day doing,
whatever you feel to be in your power; and that even all this wrong and
misery are brought about by a warped sense of duty, each of you striving
to do his best, without noticing that this best is essentially and
centrally the best for himself, not for others. And all this has come of
the spreading of that thrice accursed, thrice impious doctrine of the
modern economist, that 'To do the best for yourself, is finally to do
the best for others.' Friends, our great Master said not so; and most
absolutely we shall find this world is not made so. Indeed, to do the
best for others, is finally to do the best for ourselves; but it will
not do to have our eyes fixed on that issue. The Pagans had got beyond
that. Hear what a Pagan says of this matter; hear what were, perhaps,
the last written words of Plato,--if not the last actually written (for
this we cannot know), yet assuredly in fact and power his parting
words--in which, endeavouring to give full crowning and harmonious close
to all his thoughts, and to speak the sum of them by the imagined
sentence of the Great Spirit, his strength and his heart fail him, and
the words cease, broken off for ever. It is the close of the dialogue
called 'Critias,' in which he describes, partly from real tradition,
partly in ideal dream, the early state of Athens; and the genesis, and
order, and religion, of the fabled isle of Atlantis; in which genesis he
conceives the same first perfection and final degeneracy of man, which
in our own Scriptural tradition is expressed by saying that the Sons of
God intermarried with the daughters of men, for he supposes the earliest
race to have been indeed the children of God; and to have corrupted
themselves, until 'their spot was not the spot of his children.' And
this, he says, was the end; that indeed 'through many generations, so
long as the God's nature in them yet was full, they were submissive to
the sacred laws, and carried themselves lovingly to all that had kindred
with them in divineness; for their uttermost spirit was faithful and
true, and in every wise great; so that, in all meekness of wisdom, they
dealt with each other, and took all the chances of life; and despising
all things except virtue, they cared little what happened day by day,
and _bore lightly the burden_ of gold and of possessions; for they saw
that, if only their common love and virtue increased, all these things
would be increased together w