Reverence for life demands, therefore, as the ideal of the material and spiritual being of man, that with the completest possible development of all his faculties and in the widest possible freedom, both material and spiritual, he strives to be honest with himself and to take a sympathetic and helping interest in all the life that is around him. In earnest concern about himself he must ever keep in mind all the responsibilities which are his lot, and so, as sufferer and as actor, preserve in his relation to himself and to the world a living spirituality. There should ever be before him as true human nature the duty of being ethical in the profound world- and life-affirmation of reverence for life. If it is recognized as the aim of civilization that every man shall attain to true human nature in an existence which is as fully as possible worthy of him, then the uncritical overvaluing of the external elements of civilization which we have taken over from the end of the nineteenth century can no longer prevail among us. We are forced more and more into a reflexion which compels us to distinguish between the essentials and the unessentials of civilization. Unspiritual pride in civilization loses its power over us. We dare to face the truth that with the progress of discovery and invention civilization has become not easier, but more difficult. We become conscious of the problem of the mutual relations between the material and [pg 275] the spiritual. We know that we all have to wrestle with circumstances on behalf of our human nature, and make it an object of our care to transform the almost hopeless struggle which many have to carry on to preserve their human nature, into one which offers some hope. As a spiritual help in this struggle we offer them the spirit and temper which will allow no man ever to be sacrificed to circumstances, as if he were a mere human thing. Formulated by so-called thinkers and popularized in all possible forms, the conviction is general that civilization is the privilege of an _élite_, and that man in the mass is only a means for realizing it. At the same time the spiritual help which they can claim is denied to these men who have to wrestle to preserve their human nature. That is the effect of the devotion to reality to which we have surrendered ourselves. But reverence for life rebels against it, and produces a spirit and temper in which there is offered to every man in the thoughts of others the human value and the human dignity which the circumstances of life would deny him. The struggle has thus lost its extreme bitterness. Man has now to assert himself only against his circumstances, and no longer against his fellow-men at the same time.