The ethic of respect for life guards us from letting each other believe through our silence that we no longer experience [pg 258] what, as thinking men, we must experience. It prompts us to keep each other sensitive to what distresses us, and to talk and to act together without any feeling of shyness, just as the responsibility we feel moves us to. It makes us keep on the look-out together for opportunities of bringing some sort of help to animals, to make up for the great misery which men inflict on them, and thus to step for a moment out of the incomprehensible horror of existence. The ethic of the relation of man to man In the matter also of our relation to other men, the ethic of reverence for life throws upon us a responsibility so unlimited as to be terrifying. Here again it offers us no rules about the extent of the self-maintenance which is allowable; again, it bids us in each case come to terms with the absolute ethic of self-devotion. I have to decide in accordance with the responsibility of which I am conscious, how much of my life, my possessions, my rights, my happiness, my time, and my rest I must devote to others, and how much of them I may keep for myself. In the question of possession, the ethic of reverence for life is outspokenly individualist in the sense that wealth acquired or inherited must be placed at the service of the community, not through any measures taken by society, but through the absolutely free decision of the individual. It expects everything from a general increase in the feeling of responsibility. Wealth it regards as the property of society left in the sovereign control of the individual. One man serves society by carrying on a business in which a number of employees earn their living; another by giving away his wealth in order to help his fellows. Between these two extreme kinds of service let each decide according to the responsibility which he finds determined for him by the circumstances of his life. Let no one judge his neighbour. The one thing that matters is that each shall value what he possesses as means to action. Whether this is [pg 259] accomplished by his keeping and increasing his wealth, or by surrender of it, matters little. Wealth must reach the community in the most varied ways, if the latter is to profit by it in the best way. Those who possess little wealth to call their own are most in danger of holding what they have in a purely selfish spirit. There is profound truth in the parable of Jesus which makes the servant who had received least the least loyal to his duty.