They are sitting at a table with writing materials upon it.  Among these lies a piece of waste-paper.  Prince Hohenstiel descries upon it two blots, takes up a pen, and draws a line from one to the other.  This simple, half-mechanical act is, as he declares, a type of his whole life; it contains the word of the enigma.  His constant principle has been:  not to strive at creating anything new; not to risk marring what already existed; but to adapt what he found half made and to continue it.  In other words, he has been a sustainer or “saviour,” not a reformer of society.

Many pages are devoted to the statement and vindication of this fact, and they contain everything that can be said, from a religious or practical point of view, in favour of taking the world as we find it.  Prince Hohenstiel’s first argument is:  that he has not the genius of a reformer, and it is a man’s first duty to his Creator to do that only which he can do best; his second:  that sweeping reforms are in themselves opposed to the creative plan, because they sacrifice everything to one leading idea, and aim at reducing to one pattern those human activities which God has intended to be multiform; the third and strongest:  that the scheme of existence with all its apparent evils is God’s work, and no man can improve upon it.  There have been, he admits, revolutions in the moral as well as the physical world; and inspired reformers, who were born to carry them on; but these men are rare and portentous as the physical agencies to which they correspond, and whether “dervish (desert-spectre), swordsman, saint, lawgiver,” or “lyrist,” appear only when the time is ripe for them.  Meanwhile, the great machine advances by means of the minute springs, the revolving wheel-work, of individual lives.  Let each of these be content with its limited sphere.  God is with each and all.

And Prince Hohenstiel has another and still stronger reason for not desiring to tamper with the existing order of things.  He finds it good.  He loves existence as he knows it, with its mysteries and its beauties; its complex causes and incalculable effects; the good it extracts from evil; the virtue it evolves from suffering.  He reveres that Temple of God’s own building, from which deploys the ever varying procession of human life.  If the temple be intricate in its internal construction, if its architectural fancies impede our passage; if they make us stumble or even fall; his invariable advice is this:  “Throw light on the stumbling-blocks; fix your torch above them at such points as the architect approves.  But do not burn them away.”  He considers himself therefore, not a very great man, but a useful one:  one possessing on a small scale the patience of an Atlas, if not the showy courage of a Hercules:  one whose small achievements pave the way for the great ones.