One of the best services to render to the world is to breathe a helpful word upon it. It will be like a shower of cooling moisture on a field grown dry and dead. In it you send forth a messenger imperishable. It will echo where you little know, and it will speak for you when your lips of clay can speak no more. The Line of Necessity (1918) When a given course of action is considered or a particular step of progress is proposed, many people are in the habit of questioning whether the thing is necessary. They do not inquire whether it is desirable, whether it is helpful, or whether it is lovely. The only question raised is as to its necessity. The propounding of this question is not without its effect. The people who ask it often rob a movement of its power and occasionally cause it to fail completely. By its use a chill is often brought upon spirits which would otherwise throb with warmth. The world is deprived of the influence of many a cheerful song, helpful smile, gracious act, and kind word simply because the person who might have given them stopped to make this ever-recurring inquiry: “Is it necessary?” The people who ask the question would themselves be the least willing to have their own lives and fortunes subjected to its merciless test. They know full well that it would remove from their little worlds many of the things which now seem best and sweetest. Landscapes would lose the mystic charm which now serves to lift them above the commonplace. Daily experience would be robbed of the glamor which now makes life seem so sweet and beautiful. The glory would fade from about the brow of friendship, and even friendship itself perhaps would perish. Lovely as all these things are, they do not belong to the list of things that are absolutely necessary. They would pass away if life were denuded of all that the world could manage to get along without. As a matter of fact, many of the most blessed things we know lie on the farther side of the line of necessity. If we were never to pass beyond that line, then the world and all that it contains would be reduced to the impoverished outlines of the barest actuality. There would be no place left for hope, ambition, and dream. We should do no more work than is necessary, and our labor could no longer be a daily progress toward the summit of some mount of hope. We should have no more than is necessary, and each would become less than a peasant. We should love, help, and serve no more than is necessary, and all the joy of the unselfish and the sacrificial would be taken from life. We should have no more friends than is necessary, and one by one those who have been our greatest inspiration would depart from our ken. How poor a thing it would soon be to live!