Our aim ought not so much to be the salvation of this poor
petty self, but of that in me which alone makes it worth while to
save me; of that alone which I hope will be saved, immortal truth.
The very centre of the existence of the ordinary chapel-goer and
church-goer needs to be shifted from self to what is outside self,
and yet is truly self, and the sole truth of self. If the truth
lives, WE live, and if it dies, we are dead. Our theology stands in
need of a reformation greater than that of Luther's. It may be said
that the attempt to replace the care for self in us by a care for the
universal is ridiculous. Man cannot rise to that height. I do not
believe it. I believe we can rise to it. Every ordinary unselfish
act is a proof of the capacity to rise to it; and the mother's denial
of all care for her own happiness, if she can but make her child
happy, is a sublime anticipation. It may be called an instinct, but
in the course of time it will be possible to develop a wider instinct
in us, so that our love for the truth shall be even maternally
passionate and self-forgetting.
After all our searching it was difficult to find anything which, in
the case of a man like John the waiter, for example, could be of any
service to him.
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