hearts have no such abounding springs of love; and thus there is room for the philanthropist; but if all men were patient, laborious, and affectionate, the philanthropist’s gifts would find comparatively little scope for their exercise; there might even be a queue of benevolent people waiting for admission to any house where there was sickness or bereavement.  Moreover, all sufferers do not want to be cheered; they often prefer to be left alone; and to be the compulsory recipient of the charity you do not require is an additional burden.  A person who is always hungering and thirsting to exercise a higher influence upon others is apt to be an unmitigated bore.  The thing must be given if it is required, not poured over people’s heads, as Aristophanes says, with a ladle.  To be ready to help is a finer quality than to insist on helping, because, after all, if life is a discipline, the aim is that we have to find the way out of our troubles, not that we should be lugged and hauled through them, “bumped into paths of peace,” as Dickens says.  Just as justice requires to be tempered by mercy, so energy requires to be tempered by inaction.  But the difficulty is for the indolent, the dreamy, the fastidious, the loafer, the vagabond.  Energy is to a large extent a question of climate and temperament.  What of the dwellers in a rich and fertile country, where a very little work will produce the means of livelihood, and where the temperature does not require elaborate houses, carefully warmed, or abundance of conventional clothing?  A dweller in Galilee at the time of the Christian era, a dweller in Athens at the time of Socrates—­it was possible for each of these to live simply and comfortably without any great expenditure of labour; does morality require that one should work harder than one need for luxuries that one does not want?  Neither our Lord nor Socrates seems to have thought so.  Our Lord himself went about teaching and doing good; but there is no evidence that he began his work before he was thirty, and he interposed long spaces of reflection and solitude.  If the Gospel of work were to be paramount, he would have filled his days with feverish energy; but from the beginning to the end there is abundance of texts and incidents which show that he thought excessive industry rather a snare than otherwise.  He spoke very sternly of the bad effect of riches.  He told his disciples not to labour for perishable things, not to indulge anxiety about food and raiment, but to live like birds and flowers; he rebuked a bustling, hospitable woman—­he praised one who preferred to sit and hear him talk.  His whole attitude was to encourage reflection rather than philanthropy, to invite people to think and converse about moral principles rather than to fling themselves into mundane activities.  There is far more justification in the Gospel for a life of kindly and simple leisure than there is for what may be called a busy and successful career.  The Christian is taught rather to love God and to be interested in his neighbour than to love respectability and to make a fortune.  Indeed, to make a fortune on Christian lines is a thing which requires a somewhat sophistical defence.