From a College Window eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 248 pages of information about From a College Window.

From a College Window eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 248 pages of information about From a College Window.

The point is that habit should be there, like the hem of a handkerchief, to keep the fabric together; but that it should not be relentlessly and oppressively paraded; the triumph is to have habits and to conceal them, just as in Ruskin’s celebrated dictum, that the artist’s aim should be to be fit for the best society, and then that he should renounce it.  One ought to be reliable, to perform the work that one undertakes without ceaseless reminders, to discharge duties easily and satisfactorily; and then, if to this one can add the grace of apparent leisureliness, the power of never appearing to be interrupted, the good-humoured readiness to amuse and to be amused, one is high upon the ladder of perfection.  It is absolutely necessary, if one is to play a satisfactory part in the world, to be in earnest, to be serious; and it is no less necessary to abstain from ostentatiously parading that seriousness.  One has to take for granted that others are serious too; and far more is effected by example than by precept, in this, as in most matters.  But if one cannot do both, it is better to be serious and to show it, than to make a show of despising seriousness and decrying it.  It is better to have habits and to let others know it, than to lose one’s soul by endeavouring to escape the reproach of priggishness, a quality which in these easy-going days incurs an excessive degree of odium.

XVIII

RELIGION

There is a motto which I should like to see written over the door of every place of worship, both as an invitation and a warning:  Thou shalt make me to understand wisdom secretly.  It is an invitation to those who enter, to come and participate in a great and holy mystery; and it is a warning to those who believe that in the formalities of religion alone is the secret of religion to be found.  I will not here speak of worship, of the value of the symbol, the winged prayer, the uttered word; I wish rather to speak for a little of religion itself, a thing, as I believe, greatly misunderstood.  How much it is misunderstood may be seen from the fact that, though the word itself, religion, stands for one of the most beautiful and simple things in the world, there yet hangs about it an aroma which is not wholly pleasing.  What difficult service that great and humble name has seen!  With what strange and evil meanings it has been charged!  How dinted and battered it is with hard usage! how dimmed its radiance, how stained its purity!  It is the best word, perhaps the only word, for the thing that I mean; and yet something dusty and technical hangs about it, which makes it wearisome instead of delightful, dreary rather than joyful.  The same is the case with many of the words which stand for great things.  They have been weapons in the hands of dry, bigoted, offensive persons, until their brightness is clouded, their keen edge hacked and broken.

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From a College Window from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.