Of course the real way is that we should each of us
abandon our own desires for private ease and convenience, in the
light of the hope that those who come after will be easier and
happier; whereas the Pardiggle reformer literally enjoys the
presence of the refuse, because his broom has something to sweep
away.
And the strangest thing of all is that we move forward, in a
bewildered company, knowing that our every act and word is the
resultant of ancient forces, not one of which we can change or
modify in the least degree, while we live under the instinctive
delusion, which survives the severest logic, that we can always and
at every moment do to a certain extent what we choose to do. What
the truth is that connects and underlies these two phenomena, we
have not the least conception; but meanwhile each remains perfectly
obvious and apparently true. To myself, the logical belief is
infinitely the more hopeful and sustaining of the two; for if the
movement of progress is in the hands of God, we are at all events
taking our mysterious and wonderful part in a great dream that is
being evolved, far more vast and amazing than we can comprehend;
whereas if I felt that it was left to ourselves to choose, and
that, hampered as we feel ourselves to be by innumerable chains of
circumstance, we could yet indeed originate action and impede the
underlying Will, I should relapse into despair before a problem
full of sickening complexities and admitted failures.
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