a flower that virtue will pluck on its road, but it was not to gather this flower that virtue set forth on its travels.  It is a grave, error to think that the beauty of soul is most clearly revealed by the eager desire for sacrifice; for the soul’s fertile beauty resides in its consciousness, in the elevation and power of its life.  There are some, it is true, that awake from their sleep at the call of sacrifice only; but these lack the strength and the courage to seek other forms of moral existence.  It is, as a rule, far easier to sacrifice self—­to give up, that is, our moral existence to the first one who chooses to take it—­than to fulfil our spiritual destiny, to accomplish, right to the end, the task for which we were created.  It is easier far, as a rule, to die morally, nay, even physically, for others, than to learn how best we should live for them.  There are too many beings who thus lull to sleep all initiative, personal life, and absorb themselves wholly in the idea that they are prepared and ready for sacrifice.  The consciousness that never succeeds in travelling beyond this idea, that is satisfied ever to seek an occasion for giving all that which it has, is a consciousness whose eyes are sealed, and that crouches be-numbed at the foot of the mountain.  There is beauty in the giving of self, and indeed it is only by giving oneself that we do, at the end, begin to possess ourselves somewhat; but if all that we some day shall give to our brethren is the desire to give them ourselves, then are we surely preparing a gift of most slender value.  Before giving, let us try to acquire; for this last is a duty where from we are not relieved by the fact of our giving.  Let us wait till the hour of sacrifice sounds; till then, each man to his work.  The hour will sound at last; but let us not waste all our time in seeking it on the dial of life.

66.  There are many ways of sacrifice; and I speak not here of the self-sacrifice of the strong, who know, as Antigone knew, how to yield themselves up when destiny, taking the form of their brothers’ manifest happiness, calls upon them to abandon their own happiness and their life.  I speak of the sacrifice here that is made by the feeble; that leans for support, with childish content, on the staff of its own inanity—­that is as an old blind nurse, who would rock us in the palsied arms of renouncement and useless suffering.  On this point let us note what John Ruskin says, one of the best thinkers of our time:  “The will of God respecting us is that we shall live by each other’s happiness and life; not by each other’s misery or death.  A child may have to die for its parents; but the purpose of Heaven is that it shall rather live for them; that not by sacrifice, but by its strength, its joy, its force of being, it shall be to them renewal of strength; and as the arrow in the hand of the giant.  So it is in all other right relations.  Men help each other by their joy, not by their sorrow.  They