most enjoyable things man is capable of.  Political society, the life of men in states, is an abiding natural relationship.  It is neither a mere convenience nor a mere necessity.  It is not a mere voluntary association, not a mere corporation.  It is nothing deliberate or artificial, devised for a special purpose.  It is in real truth the eternal and natural expression and embodiment of a form of life higher than that of the individual—­that common life of mutual helpfulness, stimulation, and contest which gives leave and opportunity to the individual life, makes it possible, makes it full and complete.

It is in such a scene that man looks about to discover his own place and force.  In the midst of men organized, infinitely cross-related, bound by ties of interest, hope, affection, subject to authorities, to opinion, to passion, to visions and desires which no man can reckon, he casts eagerly about to find where he may enter in with the rest and be a man among his fellows.  In making his place he finds, if he seek intelligently and with eyes that see, more than ease of spirit and scope for his mind.  He finds himself—­as if mists had cleared away about him and he knew at last his neighborhood among men and tasks.

What every man seeks is satisfaction.  He deceives himself so long as he imagines it to lie in self-indulgence, so long as he deems himself the center and object of effort.  His mind is spent in vain upon itself.  Not in action itself, not in “pleasure,” shall it find its desires satisfied, but in consciousness of right, of powers greatly and nobly spent.  It comes to know itself in the motives which satisfy it, in the zest and power of rectitude.  Christianity has liberated the world, not as a system of ethics, not as a philosophy of altruism, but by its revelation of the power of pure and unselfish love.  Its vital principle is not its code, but its motive.  Love, clear-sighted, loyal, personal, is its breath and immortality.  Christ came, not to save Himself, assuredly, but to save the world.  His motive, His example, are every man’s key to his own gifts and happiness.  The ethical code he taught may no doubt be matched, here a piece and there a piece, out of other religions, other teachings and philosophies.  Every thoughtful man born with a conscience must know a code of right and of pity to which he ought to conform; but without the motive of Christianity, without love, he may be the purest altruist and yet be as sad and as unsatisfied as Marcus Aurelius.

Christianity gave us, in the fullness of time, the perfect image of right living, the secret of social and of individual well-being; for the two are not separable, and the man who receives and verifies that secret in his own living has discovered not only the best and only way to serve the world, but also the one happy way to satisfy himself.  Then, indeed, has he come to himself.  Henceforth he knows what his powers mean, what spiritual air they breathe, what ardors of service clear them of lethargy, relieve them of all sense of effort, put them at their best.  After this fretfulness passes away, experience mellows and strengthens and makes more fit, and old age brings, not senility, not satiety, not regret, but higher hope and serene maturity.