y about one special cause of
over-work--the ambitious desire of doing great or clever things, and the
hope of accomplishing them by immense efforts: hope as vain as it is
pernicious; not only making men over-work themselves, but rendering all
the work they do unwholesome to them. I say it is a vain hope, and let
the reader be assured of this (it is a truth all-important to the best
interests of humanity). _No great intellectual thing was ever done by
great effort_; a great thing can only be done by a great man, and he
does it _without_ effort. Nothing is, at present, less understood by us
than this--nothing is more necessary to be understood. Let me try to say
it as clearly, and explain it as fully as I may.

I have said no great _intellectual_ thing: for I do not mean the
assertion to extend to things moral. On the contrary, it seems to me
that just because we are intended, as long as we live, to be in a state
of intense moral effort, we are _not_ intended to be in intense physical
or intellectual effort. Our full energies are to be given to the soul's
work--to the great fight with the Dragon--the taking the kingdom of
heaven by force. But the body's work and head's work are to be done
quietly, and comparatively without effort. Neither limbs nor brain are
ever to be strained to their utmost; that is not the way in which the
greatest quantity of work is to be got out of them: they are never to be
worked furiously, but with tranquillity and constancy. We are to follow
the plough from sunrise to sunset, but not to pull in race-boats at the
twilight: we shall get no fruit of that kind of work, only disease of
the heart.

How many pangs would be spared to thousands, if this great truth and law
were but once sincerely, humbly understood,--that if a great thing can
be done at all, it can be done easily; that, when it is needed to be
done, there is perhaps only one man in the world who can do it; but _he_
can do it without any trouble--without more trouble, that is, than it
costs small people to do small things; nay, perhaps, with less. And yet
what truth lies more openly on the surface of all human phenomena? Is
not the evidence of Ease on the very front of all the greatest works in
existence? Do they not say plainly to us, not, "there has been a great
_effort_ here," but, "there has been a great _power_ here"? It is not
the weariness of mortality, but the strength of divinity, which we have
to recognise in all mighty things